Annvix Web Control
Well, since there wasn’t a whole lot I could do today because of the snow, I started the web gui configuration doo-hickey for Annvix which I’ve unoriginally called “Annvix Web Control”. I’ve been wanting to do this for a year now, and was hoping to have something for 1.2-RELEASE, but due to time constraints I wasn’t able to. On Sean’s suggestion, I took a look at pfSense, which is based on m0n0wall. The web interface looks pretty good, so I think I may model things after it with a few differences.
So far just the authentication routines are done. I tossed up the idea of using PHP sessions, but decided to use HTTP AUTH instead (although without relying on .htaccess) and using Solar’s phpass password encryption code rather than using MD5 or crypt() passwords. It’ll take quite a bit to get this thing up and done, but I hope to have the basics done in a month or two if I can find the time. Not much has been happening with Annvix lately just because of work and a web design project I’m working on (re-designing the Drentch website).
At any rate, the idea behind AWC is to allow for a few things, including status monitoring and configuration. It probably won’t be fully comprehensive nor will it be a replacement for shell configuration, but it will be able to configure a few things. It’s also going to be plugin-based so that, for instance, I can have a plugin to display exim logs and someone else can write one for postfix analysis. For me, the more important thing is for status monitoring… configuration is pretty low on my list. I plan to start with it being a “dashboard” so that you can see things like filesystem usage, view log files, check the load average, etc. without having to login via ssh.
I’m not sure I want to handle configuration through the web interface as that adds a lot of complexity and potential security issues (it’s less of an issue to have someone view data rather than allowing them to re-configure stuff). So I plan to start with status monitoring and some plugins that hook into third-party web apps like phpMyAdmin, etc.
Should be interesting. I hope to have the status monitoring stuff done for 2.0-RELEASE, but we’ll see what happens. It may even be generic enough to use on other operating systems. =)
