Well, I've built myself a snazzy file server, but I'd like to do some basic stuff via a custom web interface.

I know absolutely nothing about web programming. I tend to use projects to launch me in new directions, forcing me to learn things.

My problem here is that I have no idea how to even begin. Here's a list of things I'd like to be able to do:

- Authenticate against /etc/passwd for predefined users
- Edit configuration files with an online text editor (just a text box I can use to make quick changes)
- Start/Restart/Stop daemons listed in /etc/rc.d
- Have a pie graph of disk usage, and perhaps more detailed stats later on
- Have a table of HDD statistics (temperature via hddtemp, any failed tests via ide-smart)
- Copy files to an external device (/dev/sda1)
- Mount/unmount this external device
- Delete files on the external device
- Able to show output of a "locate blah" command, taking input from the interface

I know this is a pretty exhaustive list, but none of these on it's own should be particularly hard to implement. I'm not too worried about pam auth, as I could just store an MD5 sum. Cleartext PW is fine, it'll be on my local network.

My question:
What's the best way to approach this? i.e. should it run via Apache, or should it run a custom server (I'm proficient in Java...), if via apache - should it be PHP, a cgi-bin prog (C or java), etc.

I literally have 0 experience in this kind of thing, so I'm hoping for a little bit of initial guidance. I'm sure I'll come up with more specific questions later.

Do you already know HTML? I would use Apache and PHP for something like this - the authentication is easy and even written out for you in the PHP docs (and you can configure Apache to do it's authentication against the system passwd file).

The only problem I can see is that a lot of these tasks are going to need root permissions, or at the very least permissions more elevated than those of the apache user. That means sending your root (/admin) password across the network all the time. Is this box going to be available via the internet, or only on your local network? If you want internet access to it (say, to monitor/control the box from work), you'll want to be using Apache+ssl at the very least.

I predict you'll be doing a lot of "su -c 'xxxx'" style commands via PHP's passthru or exec functions.

Or, of course, you could just look at installing something like webmin, and save yourself a lot of work. But that wouldn't be any fun, now would it?

Definitely more fun to write your own, definitely local server only, definitely know HTML, and thanks.