I use Gentoo primarily for Internet servers - LAMP plus email, content scanning, virus scanning, spam filtering, and sometimes other internet-related things like IRC or Icecast. While Portage makes grabbing, building, interconnecting, and upgrading packages a snap, I'd like to take it to the next level. And that's something that's missing from ANY distro, not just our distro of choice.
For example: to get started with a LAMP system with e-mail, I can type
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emerge mod_php postfixNow don't get the wrong idea - I'm not against working on Linux, and I'm certainly not a Windows script kiddie. I understand in Linux circles (though not so much Gentoo) there are those people to whom any sort of automation is the devil's work. What I really want out of this idea is something like CPanel users have - not only a way for the server admin to get more work done easier, but to also offload client-specific admin tasks (i.e. subdomains, mail aliases, site-specific setup) off to the clients themselves.
So I got thinking, what if there was almost an internet-appliance-like Gentoo-based distro, that took advantage of the power of Portage, that could just be dropped on any box ("dropped" as in the box is cleanly formatted and this is intstalled, not "dropped" in the sense of emerging it onto a running system). After a few small hardware setup things (which could even be bypassed because the LiveCD is good at detecting network cards, for instance), the system would be installed to strict and secure but generic defaults: Apache in chroot jail, mod_gzip, PHP with every possible option, PHP Accelerator, MySQL (set up with a superuser), Postfix WITH amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, RulesDuJour, and several antivirus daemons, the structure for Postfix virtual mail hosts set up in MySQL already, Courier-IMAP and POP3 daemons, DNS services, phpMyAdmin installed and working, a good open-source webmail client (or two) for each site, log analyzers, and (here's the only really difficult part, because we'd have to write it) a CPanel-style web-based administration facility that allowed the sysadmin to access all relevant customization/config options system-wide (much like Webmin, but not as clunky), and allowed specific clients on the box to manage their own virtual server, check e-mail, view logs, do log analysis.
Anything one doesn't use could be disabled (for example, my domain registrar does my DNS so I'd just disable the DNS daemon on this system).
If you're feeling like this is the Windowsization of Gentoo, let me try to ease your mind: The beauty of Linux is that open-source programs are often rock-solid and more reliable than anything else out there, especially when they're as mature as some of the packages I'm talking about here. However, computers are supposed to work for us, not the other way around. Every time I set up a new server box there's so much to do by hand that's almost exactly the same. I think the vast majority of people running servers out there would be well served by a solution such as this: When you get down to it, just how different are our respective setups anyway? Sure, some of us need IRC and some of us don't; some of us use Postfix and some Exim. But how much would it really matter what packages were installed if it just works? For example, I just moved from Exim to Postfix because after researching for almost two years, I still can't figure out how the hell to do virtual email hosting in Exim, and Postfix spells it all out nicely, though it's still a bit of work. Plus, Exim's only interface to content filtering systems was a freakin' patch. Anyway, any personal differences in server setups can be addressed by the web-based admin interface.
Red Hat people do this all the time with CPanel, and it costs them money (plus, they have to run Red Hat). I envision a system that's open source and free from the ground up. Better, more complicated open source software has already been written. This shouldn't be all that bad.
So I'd like to ask the Gentoo community, who have given me a lot of help over the past year even though my post count doesn't reflect it, what do you think of such an idea? And who would be on board to work on it? I would of course host whatever we need. I know I need a solution like this right now (especially the client-side administration), and will need it much more in the future as I continue to host sites for people who not comfortable with working on the command-line. I'm very interested in the opinions of the Gentoo community on this. Thanks.
