Control Panel

[Steve Buehler]

At 12:55 PM 4/10/2005, you wrote:
>I've been installing Redhat ES now for a while and am getting more confident
>about getting new servers up and running, however one of our customers has
>just asked for a server running Redhat but wants to have Control Panel
>access to the box.

1.  Top posting is when you post your reply on top of the email instead of 
at the bottom like I am doing here.  Personally, I prefer top posting, but 
the majority of the community does not, so I must bottom post.  The reason 
for bottom posting instead of top posting is so that you can read from top 
to bottom  the first email to the last reply.
2.  Yes, Cpanel ( http://www.cpanel.net ) is expensive depending on how you 
look at it.  I have several servers with Ensim ( http://www.ensim.com ) on 
them and webmin ( http://www.webmin.com ).  Ensim is not free 
either.  Webmin is...under GPL I believe.
3.  Before even suggesting a control panel to a customer, you really REALLY 
need to find out what they are going to use it for.  If they are going to 
do virtual hosting and want their clients to also have a control panel, 
then Ensim or Cpanel would probably be the way to go.  Webmin will do it, 
but I find it a little clunky myself.  Cpanel has a hefty price tag.  Ensim 
has had its problems too but we go with Ensim because of the price tag.  In 
some ways though, Ensim is very costly.  They have put out a few 
upgrades/patches that have just plain trashed my system so that we had to 
have another server to move sites to and then reformat the old server.  So 
the $1,250 dollars for Cpanel is cheap compared to the extra $2,500 for a 
new server that we had to come up with an Ensim box we had to replace.  I 
have had good results with Ensim this past year though.

You are going to have to make the call, along with your client, as to what 
control panel you would want to use.  I have worked with Cpanel about 3 
years ago and didn't like it as much as Ensim.  I know other people that 
prefer Ensim over Cpanel and others that prefer Cpanel over Ensim.  I have 
webmin on all of my systems that are not Windows based even though I have 
Ensim on them too.  Be careful of that though.  Ensim and other control 
panels want to do things on your server in their own way and if you change 
things with webmin or another control panel on the same box, you can really 
mess things up.  My suggestion on that is to not have more than one control 
panel software on your server unless you really REALLY know what you are doing.

Steve