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replaced http://meta.serverfault.com/ with https://meta.serverfault.com/

OK, so I've not been around much aside from the occasional (and infrequent) scan through the review queues and hunt for unix-y questions that are interesting enough to answer (sadly less frequent than my trips through the queues lately), but here's my three-fiddy:

We've long had a policy about web hosting panels - I was the idiot overly-kind person who made the case that cpanel (or other control panel software) isn't de-facto off topic almost 3 years ago, though it's likely to be strongly correlated with crap (and thus call down suspicion on the question).

We've also long had a policy about commercial software ("Call your fucking vendor because that's what you're paying them for!" -- Server Fault is not front-line support for any software, but that's particularly for commercial software).

As far as I'm concerned both policies still hold:

  • If your question is about setting up or managing control panel software as a sysadmin (that is to say you are deploying it for your users - e.g. at a hosting company) your question may be on-topic for Server Fault, subject to our other scope and quality restrictions.
    So if you want to ask about how you can build a server template with webmin to allow limited administrative access for your customers and you actually take the time to write a question that's not crap we should try to help you out (or alternatively if web panels aren't your bailiwick leave the question alone).
  • If your question is crap, it is crap (irrespective of whether or not a "control panel" is mentioned).
  • If your question is essentially a technical support request ("Webmin is broken, how do I fix it?") it doesn't belong here. You should ask such questions of the software vendor/developer through their support channels.
  • If you are a webmin user without root access to the server (and the skills to use that access effectively) then you are a USER, and do not meet the site's definition of "professional system/network administrator". Your question is therefore ipso facto off-topic: While we will answer "beginner sysadmin" questions we are not a basic education site, nor is the Q&A format well suited for that kind of basic training.

A note regarding "control panels" in general:
For all the "holier than thou" sysadmins who want to bitch about how "professional sysadmins don't use control panels", I would point out that IBM's smit (and terminal cousin smitty) are, for all practical purposes, control panels. They abstract away the command line and present system administration options to their users based on defined access levels. That they're run under X or from a terminal doesn't change that fact, and I do not know a single professional AIX sysadmin who would say it's unprofessional to use smitty.
It is disingenuous to imply that simply because a "control panel" is used the question is not "professional", and that should by no means be used as an exclusionary factor. The question must still be evaluated for topicality using the same guidelines as any other question. For example, if someone was asking "How do I use smit to set the system hostname?" the answer would be "You should really look at the documentation IBM provided you - you paid them quite a bit for that AIX license, so get your money worth!"

Our level of support for "webmin" style panels is more limited simply because they're specialist tools that are really only understood by the folks that make/distribute them, but there are plenty of "professional sysadmin" tasks that require the use of a web control panel -- for example my company's Zimbra mail server effectively requires the use of the web interface to manage the system, as does our FreePBX phone system (both have web interfaces that regenerate config files and will overwrite your manual changes). Both of these systems are, to some extent, "in scope" for Server Fault the same way an Exchange server or Cisco Unity messaging system would be.

voretaq7 Mod
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