People who are not familiar with Linux always say that Linux User experience is terrefic ! Playing with command line, running patches, compiling packages, or looking around in the man is not always fun. However Ajax web-based interfaces become quickly in the last years very popular and provided an amazing user experience for the web, so why not for Linux ?
David Touzeau pointed me today to an interesting Open Source project he developed, called “Artica Postfix”. The project is designed to offers Postfix, fetchmail, dnsmasq, LDAP, squid,samba, dansguardian features without technical skills through a web browser with a nice web interface. The main goal of this project is to provide Linux capabilities to people who do not have the time or skills to integrate a full Mail systems or Files sharing systems or Proxy systems.
Linux is now available to everybody, administration and integration of professional software for the enterprise is another story. The addition of products such as Postfix, LDAP, Cyrus, fetchmail, procmail, amavis, clamav, spamassassin … is still an art.
After installing all components, Artica For Postfix provide a user-friendly web interface for managing mailboxes / user accounts and all rules and parameters that Postfix / SQUID /Samba provides. The administration interface is developped in PHP and Ajax and available in Open Source.
Installation procedure is simple: Artica Core is the base and the hub. You add “modules” to make an SMTP relay and / or a mailbox server and / or webmail and / or a web proxy and / or a secure web proxy.
Its goal is different from other consoles administrations already available. Webmin, for example provides a comprehensive but does not help administrator’s settings and it’s approach does not provide a “common thread”
The project is available on Sourceforge; both rpm and deb files are available for download. An ISO file can be downloaded in order to install a debian distribution with all features.
More information at http://www.artica.fr
