RE: [cobalt-developers] Can the visitor of the web site under cobalt server hosting create his own account? (more details)

["Matthew Nuzum" <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I have a web site with phpnuke. What i want is that the visitors of my
> page create their own email accounts.
> 
> The way to create an email account i going to the
> www.domainname.com/siteadmin and get in there and create the account.
> 
> Well, i need that the user of my page has the posibility to create his
> account, so i need and script to create it when the user choose a
> username and password.
> 
> When i get in my ~/siteadmin account i want to see all the users who
> are register.
> 
> Exist a script that do it, knowing i don't have root access.
> 
I've been contemplating a similar solution for a while.  I even went so
far as to evaluate other mailservers, many of which can do a better job.

However I continually ran into the problem of needing elevated
priveldges.  It makes sense.  Who would design a webserver that could
easily take control over a server like this?

My [conceptual] solution requires you to have a cron job running
periodically (as root) that will query a database for new user accounts
and then run the command line tools to add those accounts to the site.

If you are not the server administrator, you are probably not going to
be able to do this, so you'll need to get that person to help you.  You
may want to write a very simple perlscript that is clear in it's
function and ask the sysadmin to put it in the cron.hourly folder.  That
means that it would take up to an hour for the user to get their account
created.  You could also use the cron.half-hourly or
cron.quarter-hourly.  It really shouldn't matter that much.

Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org
cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx