Jim Perrin wrote: >On 2/5/06, Dustin Krysak <mailinglists at backbonetechnology.com> wrote: > > >>Hi there i was wondering if anyone on this list has any comments on >>CPanel vs Plesk on Centos 4+? Looking for the one that best work with >>the "out of the box" RPMs for Centos. >> >> > > >Knee-jerk response I'd say "neither". The cpanel people seem to >generally be good folks, but I don't approve of how they handle >packages because.. well, they don't. They have you build custom cpanel >software such as mysql, apache etc, and they seem to be perpetually >behind the latest security updates with respect to what they do >support in the distro. If you decide to use cpanel, be prepared to be >told to ask them for help, because they don't use the distro supplied >software. I have no real opinion of plesk, because I've never used it, >nor have I heard of others using it. The task of administration is >best left to admins, and best done from the command line (in my >opinion). With gui tools such as cpanel, webmin, and plesk you're only >able to configure the software as well as the person who wrote the gui >understands it and was able to script for. > > > > I can say that Webmin, and yes, I know, that wasn't in the original post... But, Webmin is very good about first not taking over anything and it is also pretty darned happy about admins working directly from the command line or from within the GUI. It is however a bit of a geeky interface. In many intances the interface provides direct access to the config files as an alternative. Using Webmin has saved me countless hours of time. It takes a lot of time to set up the module configs so that things are done the way you want to do thing and one needs to be careful to understand what gets stored within Webmin with regards to users, vhosts, etc. as somethings sort of do need to be done from webmin or you'll not have access to deal with them from webmin later. I have no direct experience with cpanel or plesk, but was a bit involved with a plesk machine from the user side and found it to be very frustrating. There was a lot you simply couldn't do from the interface that was provided in that situation, but maybe it was there to turn on if the sysadmins had set it up on the other side? Again though, Webmin is pretty geeky and really is a tool for existing admins with knowledge, not a tool to replace that knowledge. It is a timesave as it is faster at things like adding a new virtual hosting account.. once setup, just a few entries in a form and absolutely everything is done for you, from bind through email. No way I can be that fast via the command line. Best, John Hinton