LinuxWorld always sparks tons of software announcements, but one of the
coolest ones I've seen is from Emu Software, Inc. They offer
NetDirector, which allows for web-based configuration of services such
as Apache, Bind, DNS, NFS, Samba, etc. for multiple servers (and OSes -
Linux, Solaris and BSD) at the same time. It even offers scheduling and
rollback.

Anyway, the cool announcement is that the NetDirector package is now
open source! It's available free (as in beer). It's on Sourceforge, but
there's more information on the project at http://www.netdirector.org.

This software is really neat - I've seen it in action and used it
myself. It's AJAX-based, and while using both an agent and a server to
manage the service configuration files, the console interface is
web-based - which means you can log in from anywhere to make changes.
And the option to schedule is cool for those 2am downtimes - instead of
having to be awake to push the change, you can sleep through it, and
have the system email your phone/pager when it's done! I really wish my
husband would use this for his job, so he'd stop keeping me awake with
late-night config changes!

Mur!