[cobalt-users] Admin site limits - long

[Diana Brake <diana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I've had direct experience with the Admin limits on the Raq2. Note, this is 
for the Raq2 only, I don't have any idea if things will work the same on 
any other machine.

Like others, I ran into the problem with Admin limits shortly after getting 
my Raq2, but before it went online. My tech support at the co-loc site we 
use was stumped and Cobalt took three days to even answer, and then their 
response was to use site admins for FTP. I, for one, found this to be 
unacceptable, because it wasn't efficient to have to log on with different 
site admins for each site. I often update three-four or even more sites at 
once and being able to go up/down the /home/sites/site# tree with one admin 
was much nicer. Creating multiple admins doesn't completely fix that 
problem because some of my updates may be on a different "bank" of sites, 
but the odds are good that I can eliminate multiple FTP logins. So, my 
support guy suggested this and it works fine..and doesn't break the GUI.

My Raq2's IP is not shared by any virtual site on the machine, and I don't 
use the Admin ID for anything but the maintenance of the Raq2. So, on the 
main Raq2 site, we set up multiple admins users, using the GUI interface 
..ex) Admin1, Admin2, Admin3, Admin4 etc. each admin can have his own 
password. This puts the new admin users in the following lines in the 
/etc/group and note here..the /etc/group- files.

home:x:110:admin,admin2,admin3,admin4,admin5,
admin:x:27:admin,admin2,admin3,admin4,admin5

You have to add your admins after the original in the wheel by hand. (I 
make backups of my group and group- files every time BEFORE editing them) 
(Note: you have to be root to edit the /etc/group and /etc/group- files.)

wheel:x:10:root,admin,admin2,admin3,admin4,admin5

I never use admin for a virtual site. He is only used for the maintenance 
of the Raq2. So admin2 was assigned sites 1-25, admin3 sites 26-50, admin4 
sites 51-75, etc. This makes it easy for me to remember which admin is used 
for a given site, and prevents the assigning of admin# to to many groups 
(the basis of this problem anyway..:). Creating a site through the GUI 
always places admin as a user in that group. So, I edit the group and 
group- files to take admin out and insert the appropriate admin# for each 
site. Because admin is not in lots of groups by default, my maintenance of 
these files does not have to be done on a daily or even weekly basis. Once 
set up, I find that I don't use the GUI interface for a given domain very 
often, because many of our clients like to do their own work, and most of 
my work is done through FTP just updating sites. You don't even have to 
update new sites right away unless you yourself are going to be 
administering/FTPing to them. Siteadmins are not affected by which of your 
own admins also has access..:)

Suggestion: when editing the group/group- files...be sure to run diff 
afterwards to make sure you did exactly the same thing to each file. They 
must mirror each other, exactly.

So, the GUI still works...multiple admins are recognized, more sites can be 
added and my work gets done..:)

I'm sorry for the length, but I'm hoping the explanation will help and find 
it's way to the archives. I know when I was first dealing with this 
problem..the archive made hints, but there were no instructions for what to do.

Diana
Crest Communications, Inc.		diana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Beautiful Sunny Florida		http://crestcommunications.com/
352-495-9359