Abstract

ezAdmin is a server administration toolbox for managing web servers. It is entierely based on Debian GNU/Linux Sarge.

Goals

The projet provides a remote interface for a Debian web server, their is no control panel included for the moment but an XML-RPC interface. Planet-Work uses it's own control panel developped in Java + Struts technologies, it is fully integrated with the global administration panel.

Technologies

EZadmin is written in Python 2.4 with some parts of C for wrappers (see below), the remote interface is provided by a autonomous XML-RPC server also in python.

Each provided service like mail, web, or ftp management is provided by modules. Adding functionalities only require creating a module.

EZadmin directly modifies the system configuration, modifications are immediately available.

Available modules

EAadmin currently provides the following modules :

• system : Users management
• bind : DNS service with bind (with ou without capabilities)
• vmail : Messenging services with Exim4, courrier POP and IMAP
• proftpd : Proftpd with virtual users (designed for Linux Virtual Servers)
• pureftpd: default FTP service
• web : Apache2, PHP4, PHP5, suPHP, CGI support with awstats for statistics
• mailman : mailing list management
• apt (in developpement) : interface for adding, removing packages

Security

EZadmin has been developped with security in mind. The XMLRPC server runs unprivileged and uses very simple suid wrappers in C in order to perform privileged operations. Each wrapper checks if the running user is ezadmin, enventually becomes another user like mail or bind and also checks all the entries and files before doing the operation. Restricted Linux capabilities will be used in the future.

Also, because EZadmin use no custom package or configuration the administrator can perform a system upgrade without breaking everything. This is very important that security issues present in Debian software can be fixed as soon as possible.

Why another interface ?

There are several projects like EZadmin :

• vhffs : debian based (GPL)
• ISPConfig (GPL)
• Ensim : commercial
• Plesk : expensive

These free or commercial solutions are more or less complete but have several common problems :

• They relies on a database : administrator cannot manage the system with the GNU/linux commande line interface.
• They add many custom packages like apache,php, mysql ... : it's not possible to use the native distribution update method without breaking everything
• They works on many linux distributions so they are very complex.
• They provides their own interface

Close projects:

• DTC(GPL)