Revisiting the Server Project
I did a lot of looking, a lot of trial installations of various software, and I arrived at a single conclusion: managing a server through http or https is really, fundamentally foolish.
This puts me firmly in the old school, but I really think it’s true. OpenSSH is the way to go. If I were to ever do anything in this way, I would definitely write an administrative program in Python and run it ‘suid root’ with restrictive execution permissions. That way, admins can run it and make root-level changes without assuming root on their own shell.
There’s a Python library called Python Dialog that gives you oh-so-old-school dialog interfaces to scripts. An Apache/Postfix/passwd admin system would be pretty easy to set up.