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Server Management

Web Server Management

What is a "Web Server Management" File System?

The default website organization that most Linux distributions install and offer is not (in my opinion) sophisticated enough for modern server management. Managing a web server now requires a collection of related tools that should be located as much in the same place as possible.

This is my suggested way to accomplish the goal of assembling and collecting a basic set of tools that can be used to manage a server via the browser. Popular packages for this are:

  • A server home page that offers basic information about the server and links to tools
    • A link to a web-based administration tool (like cpanel or Webmin)
    • A link to PHP information
    • A link to a memcached GUI tool (like PHPMemcachedAdmin)
    • A link to a MySQL GUI tool (like PHPMySQLAdmin)

While these tools may be located at different places in the physical file system, they are actually used by the same people and often around the same time. To me, it makes a certain amount of sense to consolidate them in one place instead of having to remember where they all are, because their use an be somewhat infrequent and memory fades.

I have created a downloadable .tgz archive that installs and places everything in the same file system for ease of management. Here it is:

What It Does

What the .tgz archive does is put a filesystem in place with all of the tools mentioned above, as well as a 1-page website template with links to them. It also attempts (as much as possible) to place all of the assets required to implement server monitoring in a dedicated area of the server filesystem that is already dedicated to web-oriented offerings. 

              
From: 

var
 └── www
      └──html
var
 └── logs
      └──apache2

To:

var
 └── www
      └──host
          ├── logs
          ├── phpinfo
          ├── PHPMemcachedAdmin
          ├── PHPMySQLAdmin
          ├── site
          ├── template
          └── webalizer

Where it Goes 

              
# cd /var/www
# wget https://www/graham-leach.com/downloads/web-server-filesystem/web-server-filesystem-latest.tgz
# tar -zxvf web-server-filesystem-latest.tgz