[TriLUG] Good Open-Source MySQL Portal-Maker?

[James Brigman]

Hey TriLUGers - Currently at work, we use a MS-SQL database for tracking
servers and various configuration parameters about said servers: CPU #
and speed, RAM, Disk, lease end date, etc. It's all manual, and it's an
extreme pain to use and update (manually). Worse yet, it's not
web-delivered, multi-user and remote sites can't use it at all. Plus,
performance over WAN links is terrible. 

This seems like a perfect application to host on MySQL fronted with a
web-form type front end. I'd love nothing better than to pull the data
out of the MS-SQL database and put it into MySQL, then serve it using an
authenticated, Apache-served web page.

My question to the list is: has anyone built MySQL databases containing
your equipment inventories and fronted with web portals where you can
add/edit/delete the various bits of data? 

And if anyone is doing such a thing, is there a good tool for quickly
making such a database portal, or am I just being a database n00b by
assuming it's a major deal to do it from the ground up without a tool to
help? (I figure things like drop-downs, select fields and data typing
are non-trivial to do in a web form.)

More importantly, is anyone using such a portal as a foundation for,
say, NAGIOS monitoring, such that the NAGIOS tool uses the database to
know what to monitor? What say you big pulsing *NIX brains of the
TriLUG?

JKB