"How many times have you needed a quick and dirty method of displaying data, in a 'dashboard' format, that everybody could easily view? Everybody has a Web browser, so why not use that for your dashboard? PHP and Apache make it easy. Here's how you can take a text file, evaluate the content using PHP, then display results on a browser dashboard.
"You'll need a networked Linux box with Apache and PHP loaded as your data collection server. My server is on old 200MHz Pentium desktop box with 128MB of memory and SUSE Linux 8.2 Pro installed. A recycled desktop machine can easily serve dashboard pages for 20 or 30 people..."