Securing Webmin with Tcp Wrappers and SSH Port Forwarding-A Practical and Economical Approach

More and more companies are utilizing software developed and maintained by the Open Source community to handle a multitude of security and administrative functions. Economics - relating to software and/or labor costs - play a critical role in the decision process, and companies are looking to replace expensive applications, which in most cases run only on the original platform for which they were purchased. It also costs a lot of money to upgrade and renew licenses on an annual basis. With the old convention of applications purchased from a vendor, you need someone who has been trained on both the hardware and software to ensure immediate productivity, or you must invest time and money training employees. This becomes an ongoing investment as attrition and turnover occur. Open Source software minimizes costs considerably. There is no cost for the software itself; open source is typically easy to use and train; and the software can be loaded on an employee's personal computer and learned at home. The advent of Open Source developed on Intel platforms allows for portability and scalability to other systems. A user can readily download the software on their PC and quickly get up to speed. Once the package has been learned, generally you can scale to other platforms with relative ease.