Jim Perrin wrote:
>On 2/5/06, Dustin Krysak <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
