Re: [cobalt-users] Linux User Ignorance,

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:28 AM 3/3/00 -0600, you wrote:

> Is there a way to have the user authentication database, seperating the
> authentication, email, and web services by domain?

Sure.  Don't use unix or Linux.

Actually, there are probably some expensive mail-server solutions that 
offer this, but then the solution wouldn't work with the Cobalt web-based 
gui interface.

Cobalt could have modified Linux extensively (and I do mean extensively) to 
support this with users, or they could have tripled the price of the box 
and included expensive software (we sell mailserver software for $2,300 for 
unlimited use and it DOESN'T include this feature), but they chose to go 
with the open source solution the rest of the world is using <smile>.

Since the version of Linux cobalt is using limits us to 8-character user 
names, they could have set their own arbitrary limit of 5-character user 
names, and internally appended the site number, to create "virtual 
users".  But that would have entailed a lot of software modification, 
too.  The RaQs and Qubes would no longer run standard Linux.

> If anyone can help, please do!

I understand what would have to be modified to do this, but remember, you'd 
end up with a completely nonstandard system with 5-character user names.  I 
estimate it would take between 400 and 500 man-hours to change the Linux, 
sendmail and pop daemon source-code and thoroughly test the changes.  And 
perhaps another few hundred hours to document the Cobalt gui, and change it 
to support the new Linux code.  I charge us$75/hour; do you really want to 
pay for these changes <smile>?

There may very well be other solutions; none of them will be integrated 
into the Cobalt web-based gui interface, though.

The best suggestion I can come up with comes from the footer found on 
another list, the isp-frequented Internet Access List:

"Eat sushi frequently."  You'll find that fortified with some good sushi, 
you too can do aliases <smile>.

Jeff

--
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>