OMC Lives !

As a reply to the proposal MichaelDehaan from RedHat made on an OpenManagement Backend Format made

Jamie Cameron of Webmin fame writes

That looks like an excellent proposal to me .. I plan to start adding an XML interface to Webmin in the near future that will allow its existing backend API to be accessed through calls like those you described.

Now that's a really good direction ...

I used to dislike webmin because it gave incompetent users a reason not to search for help because they could just click away and destroy their systems from their browsers (freel free to s/webmin/yast/g;) , so I never really looked closer a it , I've also always been under the impression that webmin just didn't scale, if you wanted to modify something on 5 machines you had point your browser to 5 different urls.

If however you have an interface to webmin , and those are being standardised, you could actually centrally tell a group of machines to do a certain action. Still no CFengine or Puppet replacement but probably quite usefull for a large group of people.