[Freedombox-discuss] Kerberos and remctl instead of exmachina?

[Tim Retout]

On 3 Sep 2013 08:10, "Jonas Smedegaard" <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> What I am thinking is a CGI interface run as an isolated user (e.g. via
> uwsgi or apache2-suexec) talking to debconf.

Hi! My thoughts:

1. Presumably debconf needs root privileges, so would you grant that user
some limited sudo rights?

2. The UI may also need to restart services, and these can take time. Using
a separate daemon (e.g. exmachina) to handle blocking calls allows the web
UI to call it asynchronously and show progress info to the user, which is
good for usability.

3. I am sceptical that it will be possible to add debconf hooks for every
configuration choice needed by the FreedomBox UI.  The debian-edu project
handles more complex configuration using cfengine - if they found it
necessary, I suspect this project will. (I believe Petter might know more
about this than me.)

A web interface for server management is a really interesting problem, and
I think it's worth solving properly. I'd be interested to hear what you
think.

Kind regards,

Tim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20130903/2ec27763/attachment.html>