Im just starting to play around with a spare computer that I set up as a redhat 9 server. Its interesting to me that for the http server they give you a gui, yet for the ftp server they just want you to edit vsftpd.conf to do all your configurations? Seems if one has a gui the other should too. I dont mind playing around in a text environment (kinda like the challenge actually) but I want to be sure Im not missing anything here. Is there more to ftp then just that file, or is that all i get?

everything is file in linux. you are better off playing with files if you can do so. It is not rare that a program has only one config file.

Well apache is a more popular webserver and more likely to have a GUI configuration tool than vsftpd since its not the most popular ftp server out there as there are many that are in use compared to the 75% of webservers running apache. Just a guess but it could be less than 5% running vsftpd and the such. That's probably why they don't have a gui for it.

But like ugob stated, all the GUI is doing is editing the files for you, sometimes its just quicker to edit them yourself manually, especially since most don't run X on servers anyways since it only takes away resources that could be used elsewhere.

Let's just take away the Apache GUI.

Wha? Apache has a GUI to do this for you? Even on Windows, I've always configured Apache by hand.