I’m really not knowledgable enough about either webmin or DirectAdmin to know what the strengths and weaknesses of each are.

The extent I’ve used webmin is mostly so I could have our helpdesk who only really knew windows handle basic system administration tasks such as adding and removing users.

For me personally I’m pretty old school in that I’d really rather do things with command prompts, config files, and scripts. Probably due to the fact that I date from the days when having an X terminal was a rare thing and the Internet meant email, usenet news, FTP, and Telnet (no web or even gopher yet). I’m also one of those sickos who thinks writing their own rulesets for Sendmail is fun.

You insist on a Treo, five days later I have one.
You comment on how I should come to San Jose, a week later I’m at SFO feeling very peculiar.
A Tivo is -very- close to arriving at my house =p

Need I go on? Voodoo magic! Mmn, teh magic is still being worked o_O;

Interesting discussion going on here. Re: DirectAdmin vs. Webmin… the choice is mostly important if you have a hosting company. DirectAdmin does a lot of things on the user end that Webmin/Usermin doesn’t, with perhaps the most important ability being the ability to create resellers. This may not be important to you if you’re just giving people FTP access, but it’s critical to those of us who want users to be able to create their own domain names.

DirectAdmin is also 100% PHP and skinnable, which means you can toss PHP commands in any file and redesign the skin with a PHP script. It’s very useful and, IMHO, is much cleaner than the Perl/CGI backend of Webmin.

I can definitely see your point if you’re just maintaining a web server for yourself; I’ve used Webmin in these situations before. But if you’re offering hosting to others (either as a business or as a hobby), DirectAdmin is well-worth the investment.

-Erica

I use DirectAdmin and webmin together, because webmin doesnt do a lot of what directadmin does, and in some cases vice versa. I despise having to do everything in text files.

I hate working on paper. It offers no flexibility anymore until you scan it in, even then its not that useful. Guess some people just refuse to change with the times.

I’m not (yet) a big fan of PDAs or PDA/phones. I’ve always prefered a paper organizer. Most of the PDA phones have the added handicap that they are far bigger than I really want a phone to be. That said I’m sure that with better software my Nokia 6800 would make a decent PDA (but I would settle for a SSH client). I suppose once I’m working again I’ll try a Palm device and see what all of the fuss is about.

As for DirectAdmin while it is a slick looking web administration interface I have to agree with Francis that I don’t see what other than the pretty icons it has over webmin. For that matter as a rather experienced sysadmin my interfaces of choice are a shell prompt, vi, and emacs.

As a side note, here are the things I am evangelist about:
1) Linux
2) Open source
3) Anime (japanese animations)
4) PDAs in general:)