[CentOS] which programming language for server-side admin tasks

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I would like to spend some time learning a new coding language, but
>specifically for server side admin stuff, i.e. setting up users / databases
>/ FTP accounts / virtual domains on Apache, etc.
>
We use python for most of the things we write now after having
used perl for about 15 years.

You may find that webmin is useful for this type of thing as it
can be configured to allow users to do pretty much anything, and
to limit what they can do.  On the other hand, IHMO it's written
in pretty ugly perl, and I have found some major problems (e.g.
happily removing the entire /home directory when changing a
user's $HOME with a type).  When we do set this up, we generally
restrict access to the local LAN and a very small set of public
IP addresses.

There is also a webmin companion program, usermin, which allows
users to do many of their own user maintenance functions.
Unfortunately I have seen it used in several cases to change
mail user's shell from /bin/false to /bin/bash then giving access
to the shell.  Again, this can be restricted to the private LAN
as webmin allows.

As for starting from scratch to do these things, it's probably a
better idea to take something that does most of what you want and
hack it to your needs.  As others have said, this can help avoid
the many pitfalls that one can find when doing security related
administrative tasks.  As an example, webmin allows one to
specify a post-processing python script for user administration,
and we provide one for our SMB customers that automatically updates
things like Samba and jive_messanger user info in a single step.

Bill
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