Re: [cobalt-users] hitting the 250-user limit

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hostmaster wrote:

> 1. Cobalt could AND SHOULD rewrite the GUI so that it handles more. They can
> do this by branching the GUI in the very beginning so that it opens/reads
> only a certain number of sites at one time and only makes them available for
> editing. When you want to edit the other sites, you go back to the beginning
> and start over choosing the branch (group of sites) you want to edit. While
> not a simple thing, it needs to be done as this is a severe limitation to
> the server.

Since Cobalt considers the RaQ3 to be an appliance designed to host 200
sites, it works within it's design specs; I doubt they see it the same
way you do.

It's like a toaster.  It's designed to toast four slices bread.  Should
someone redesign it to toast six slices of bread?  Not if the whole
purpose of the toaster is to toast four slices of bread <smile>.

> 2. You can easily bypass the GUI and work directly with Apache. I covered
> this in a post about two weeks ago and gave the virtual host code. According
> to the user I gave it to, the site doesn't even show up in the GUI but works
> fine.

I still worry that mixing non-gui and gui-sites might somehow someday
cause problems...

> There are a couple of caveats but I'm sure there are workarounds.
> 
> 1. ftp/password access?

FTP should just work for each user; if it doesn't, it should be easy to
fix the config file.

The # passwd command should work for changing the password.

> 2. email setup?
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts as to these last two? How do you manually (no GUI)
> setup both of these? On our BSD system, I can add users directly to the
> passwd file via an adduser program via telnet. Is there such a thing on the
> RAQ2?

Well of course for both 1 and 2 above you need to create the user
first.  You can do that manually, by editing the /etc/group, /etc/shadow
and /etc/user files.  Or you can just run useradd, or make your own
adduser (which I've done for people in the past).  Of course either way
you may have a problem with user numbers; I'd want to try it to see.

> What about adding aliases manually to either the aliases file or
> virtusertable file? I've read earlier posts on Jeff using a separate aliases
> file (aliases.local) and configuring sendmail.cf to find this file. What
> about duplicate alias names? Where would these be placed? What about ftp
> access?

Not sure what you mean by duplicate names.  Here's how sendmail uses
/etc/virtusertable and then /etc/aliases....


Mail comes in to box for virtual site-name.

Sendmail looks for it in virtusertable.

If it finds it in virtusertable, it delivers it to the address in
virtusertable, if not, it delivers it to a user of the same name on the
system.  If no such user exists, it returns the email as undeliverable.

Once it finds an address in virtusertable, sendmail looks in it's own
"aliases" file, which is a hash of all the alias files you've set up
yourself.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672
Riverside, CA  92517
voice: (909) 787-8589  *  fax: (909) 782-0205