Managing an Ubuntu Server [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
Is there a tool for web based system administration?

I'm working on a few projects at the moment, including working with PHP, ASP.Net and Mono, and wanting to learn Python (in both a scripting and web context).

Although my laptop (Win 7) works pretty well for the development stuff i need, i want to run a Linux server to host my projects on for some proper testing and to make sure that any differences between the Windows and Linux platforms are ironed out (read differences between Mono and .Net framework ;) ).

I've got some old hardware which I'm going to be using as the server and as i have some experience with Ubuntu on the desktop i figured i would give Ubuntu server a go. Installation was fine, and everything's working as expected, but i find the command line a bit of a bind.

My question is: Does anyone know of any nice server management software which can be installed to make maintaining the server any easier. I've already got things like PHPMyAdmin installed which makes managing the MySql server a breeze, but I still have to login to do a lot of the donkey work to keep the server up-to-date etc. Is there any (maybe web based?) software out there that would make maintaining the server easier?

Thanks, Mo

Solution 1:

Is there any (maybe web based?) software out there that would make maintaining the server easier?

Quick and painless: No.

There is some webbased software out there (like Webmin or Confixx), but it'll cause more problems than it helps.

For keeping your server up to date, you can simply use sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade on the command line.

Solution 2:

Canonical offers Landscape which has a 30 days free trial. Landscape is an all in one monitoring and deployment management system. Ultimately though it's going to be worth while to invest time in learning basic bash scripting and basic system administration.

Solution 3:

There's also zentyal(formerly named ebox) and Ubuntu Server Guide now recommends puppet:

https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/serverguide/remote-administration.html

Solution 4:

For what i have heard there are 3 very good ones:

Canonical offers LANDSCAPE which (as the webpage says) is a systems management tool that helps you monitor, manage and update your entire Ubuntu infrastructure from a single interface. Part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage support service, Landscape brings you intuitive systems management tools combined with world-class support.`

You can see info about it here: https://landscape.canonical.com/ and here: http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantage/landscape

Then you have WEBMIN which includes linux based servers. You can see info about it here: http://www.webmin.com/ (And also download the DEB packages from there)

Last you have ZENTYAL in http://www.zentyal.org/ which offers many combinations of management solutions.

But apart from this 3 i REALLY!! recommend knowing several terminal commands in the server world for Ubuntu/Linux before toying with this 3 or any other. For me, to have a server one should at least have some intermediate knowledge of how the server works and several (More than 50 at least) commands that will solve many problems that this web based tools might not. Also to learn scripting in the terminal, concatenating commands, creating some bash scripts is ideal for a server environment. This is just my opinion about the knowledge one should know before going to the server world since not everything GUI related will solve everything or will do everything that the terminal can do.