Autarchy of the Private Cave

To cut the long story short: for the final evaluation, I had this line of control panels:

• SysCP
• Domain Technologie Control, DTC
• Virtualmin (also Webmin, Usermin)
• ISPConfig
• RavenCore
• GNUPanel

SysCP: looks good to me (they have a working demo), has customer billing module. Unsure as to where it is used, but most probably sponsors are also the users of SysCP. Majority of support forums is in German.

DTC: has no demo, only some screenshots. Has a set of packages for Debian lenny (which is a huge plus for maintenance and future upgrades). DTC is being developed by GPLHost, and is also used by GPLHost - so this is a live (used) distribution. Seems quite feature-rich.

Virtualmin claims to be the “world’s most powerful and flexible web server control panel”. Virtualmin offers 4 means to control it: Web, mobile device, command line, and remote API. There are both screenshots and demo. Has both GPL and Professional versions. GPL version has a number of limitations, comparing to Pro version. From what I’ve read about Webmin (all three - Virtualmin, Webmin, Usermin - are just different “layers” of server control), it is a framework with a number of “interface scripts”, which allow to control various services. As such, it is easily extendible, but is not monolithic - in the sense of module inter-dependencies and action triggers.

RavenCore, if it had a working demo, could be an option. It seems to be quite actively developed, but all the screenshots are outdated, and demo isn’t working. However, based on what I’ve read, at least some people seem to be satisfied with this CP.

GNUPanel is a year-old control panel, but has a news item on the front page (dated August, 17) promising new, completely rewritten release somewhere in October. By the feature list, looks promising. However, I need the panel right now, and even in October, that will be quite a rough release, not really used/tested anywhere, so not a good option as well. But GNUPanel is a panel to check in half a year for progress.

As the final choice, I had ISPConfig (which seems to be the best by people’s comments), and which is also quite widely used, and is easy to install onto Debian (at least the Perfect setup: Debian Etch says so), and DTC. I discarded Virtualmin (for the poor functionality of the GPLed version), RavenCore (for the lack of current descriptions and non-functioning demo), GNUPanel (which just isn’t ready yet), and SysCP (because ISPConfig seems better ).

As DTC has Debian packages (and will be easier to maintain/upgrade), I decided to try it first. I already have it installed (that’s easy, esp. if you first read the DTC Debian Express Setup). Later I might post my impressions from using DTC.