Currently, the only foreseeable way to check if the user has a particular peice of software installed is to run a command from the software, eg "mysql --help", and then if that returns false, mark that it isn't installed, and add it to the downloads package... that or type -P "command", that way the path will get returned. Anyways, there are some packages which i would reccomend for security and other purposes would be; * IPTables - Pretty easy to parse and add to the web frontend, plus a good deterrent for people who are trying to mess with your server. * Snort/Tripwire - For making absolutely clear how many users are doing what they shouldn't be. Thats all i can think of atm.
By default the command used so as to know if apackage is installed is to stop and start the software.... such as (under debian) /etc/init.d/mysql stop but I think that is that distrib you can by default run the command apt-get xxxx because if the package is already installed it doesn't download it. (But there is an other pb if it was compiled manually...)
Yes, thats one possibility. Or you run the which command, thats the way the current installer checks for packages. But with which you dont know if the package named mysql was the bind server In any way, the installer might need an internal table how the software names might be. e.G. httpd, apache and apache2 are the three common names for the apache binary currently used by the different supported linux distributions. Maybe also something like portsentry? There is already an IPTables firewall integrated in ISPConfig, the bastille firewall scripts. But you can not entry detailed IPTables roules, only open / close ports.
