Hi all,
My development box (on my local network), I use it a lot for deploying sites before they are released into the wild on the live server. What I tend to do is create a virtual host on the Linux server, then on the client machine I will be using to access it, I edit the host file so the domain resolves to the IP of the development box (this part has been in use for years).

I then have the issue of configuring it. My current solution is to have a web interface (My control panel). From there the user (me) can make changes to certain aspects of the "hosting". Say for example zone files... I create "fake" zone files. In reality, these are just saved to a MySQL database. I then have a cron that runs every minute to read that MySQL table and if it contains an entry new=yes it creates the new text file based on the DB entries, and then updates the DB to have new=no. That way only changed zones get updated.

There has to be a more efficient way to do this whereby the file is updated right away. How do real control panels deal with this issue?
I am thinking of somehow having a high-level action trigger a low-level script to update files... This is something I have not really looked into a lot ,and I am hoping someone with a lot more Linux experience than me can offer some suggestions.

Mack.