best way to do it?

[Anon]

Hi,

This is really a request for thoughts by server administrators or people with good unix knowledge. (However, everyone's opinion will be appreciated).

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I have successfully taken a lot of steps to secure / establish a working linux server with all necessary protocols and agents. I have also been able to test small php applications which open pipes to files and write / read data from them.

The problem isn't execution, it's figuring out the best way to take the next step.

I have to :

->Write a multi-user web based management tool which will edit server files.

The problem is, with multiple users adding and deleting entries from 'qmail / ftp' configuration files, I need a system which can lock out files under 'process' and queue user requests for later processing.

This is my plan :

Write user requests to 'individual_user_queue' file. Have cron loop through a directory and read the file entries one by one and execute them.

Run cron every 10 minutes or so in the background to accomplish this.

I am sure others have written many programs like this, and measures must have been taken to avoid sticky situations. I am simply open to any suggestions / ideas you may have.

Thank you for reading this looong post 🙂

Regards,
-m.

[Anon]

Webmin ( http://www.webmin.com/ ) wouldn't be what you are looking for is it? Not sure if it works well with concurrent accesses but it was designed for total system administration.

[Anon]

Thanks for your response Ken.

I have used webmin for a while, and it does provide a good solution, however, my system administration issue is limited to giving user access for very simple functions in a very secure environment.

Right now I just need a means of writing to a file which :

a) only allows one user access at a time.
b) makes other requests wait while current request is processed.

I can code this - but I am not sure if this is the right thing to do. What if 2 initial requests are received at the exact same time....

-m.