Re: DTC competition with ISPMAN

thomas-5VVOt45T8ASrG/[email protected] wrote:

>http://www.gplhost.com/?rub=softwares&sousrub=dtc
>
>
>well, yeah, seriously nice with DTC
>ISPMAN using ldap, DTC using mysql
>
>for those who don't interested in setting up ldap server, mysql might be
>alternative choice for you. but, isn't openldap performance is faster than
>mysql ? (also, I know once openldap being setup, it is not easy to break)
>
>that's your call, mysql or ldap :)
>  
>
Oh, while we are at it... ;)

I was curious and had a look at DTC.
If you are interested in a short, personal review in respect to ISPMan, 
keep on reading.

DTC is a web-based ISP management software, quite similiar to ISPMan.
It is completely (as far I can tell) written in PHP and comes with 
support for quite a bunch of  external software.

Install:
Since GPL.Host provide a Debian archive for their software, I used that 
to deploy it on my Debian box.
The install went surprisingly well, but I had to tweak the postinstall a 
little bit, to make it work (PHP CLI didn't use mysql extention).
The basic configuration is completely done via debconf dialogs during 
install, which is used to reconfigure your existing services (apache, 
bind, etc.) to match the DTC installation. For my taste this was a bit 
too much intrusive, since it rendered quite a few existing services 
unusable. But for a clean box this may be ok or even helpful.

Usage:
Please don't expect a detailed report here. As ISPMan, DTC is obviously 
quite a complex software (maybe worse), so I did only some rough tests 
to get an impression.
The UI looks quite nice and comes with configurable skins in 
multi-language. The different forms show a lot of functionality, which 
is, for my personal taste, often a bit chaotic. For a head start, I 
couldn't say that the UI is very intuitive (well, neither is ISPMan ;), 
but one may get used to that when using it daily.
 From a feature perspective, DTC seems to be more complete than ISPMan, 
since there is support for traffic logging, charging and probably some 
other stuff I haven't totally grasped yet.

Under the hood:
DTC does everything in their MySQL database.
OS interaction is done from the UI directly as well as via a cron job 
that runs periodically to update conf files (similar to ispman-agent).
Apache logs are stored directly in MySQL (sql_log_module) which is used 
for traffic evaluation.
Other systems, such as mail, ftp, etc. are all linked to the MySQL database.

Conclusion:
DTC looks like a nice, more complete, system - maybe it is. At a first 
glance, it could be tough competition to ISPMan, which is still lacking 
some functionality (esp. for reporting and delegated administration).
On second sight, you'll figure out, that both systems are actually quite 
different, focusing on different types of ISPs.
If you are that everything-on-one-box ISP, that can live with the 
limitation on supported programs (having MySQL support), DTC may be your 
choice.
In fact, this would be my personal top reason for not using the 
software, because I could not find any multi-host, multi-tier support 
for managing more than just the local machine.
But that is ISPMan's domain, utilizing all those different web, file, 
dns hosts via a common perl backend which are linked by the ispman-agent 
instances.
Besides that, LDAP is used as a backend repository (which can be both, 
curse and blessing - see my previous mail) but from an integration point 
of view it provides me with an open LDAP directory, which can be used by 
just so many products.
I clearly prefer the latter architecture...

Surely, both projects can learn quite a bit from each other, improving 
their software in friendly competition.

I hope you found this somewhat helpful. Please comment or correct 
anything of this.

Joerg