RE: [cobalt-users] i should know this one ....

["Carrie Bartkowiak" <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

||>>Repyling to my own message - gotta be a sign of losing it.
||>
||>Well, I changed the title back to the original then. I hope that
||>doesn't mess things up.

Actually this title was from another list member, and I had replied to his
message... still it's okay, I found it. :)

||>>I've been digging through the archives because I remember
||>something about
||>>how an Admin can only admin 32 sites. This, to me, completely
||>sucks - but I
||>>suppose I'll have to deal with it.
||>
||>As do we all. It's a system software limitation, not a Raq problem
||>specifically.

But with the system software being Cobalt's, then isn't it a Cobalt
limitation?  Or is this true for *all* Linux servers with Apache overlay?

||>
||>>However, the instructions I found in this message completely lose me:
||>>http://list.cobalt.com/pipermail/cobalt-users/2000-October/022037.html
||>>
||>>And I still have no idea what actual 'level' of administration
||>all of these
||>>different Admins have.
||>
||>They actually aren't different Admins -- they are all you, Carrie. At
||>least this is the case on Raq3 and I can't see how it would be
||>different on Raq4s. When you create a site on the Raq, it makes you
||>the admin for the site even if you have created a user and named this
||>person the admin for the site. You are then both admins for that site.

*nodding*
That's what I do. Lots of the sites on the machine are my own, but even then
I still upload to them as the site administrator, not Admin. For the sites
that aren't my own, when I'm first setting up the site and putting some
things in it (scripts they get with the site, or maybe helping out a person
who needs some hand-holding) I'll do it with their username, so that they
won't have a problem modifying those files later with the ownership issue.

||>This rather charming little anomaly then confronts you with the "site
||>admin limit" and you can't ftp anything new after you've reached the
||>limit. :-)

"Charming"? *Cough*  Hehe

||>Solution is simple; we do it all the time. You go to etc/group with
||>an editor and check it out -- you'll see admins for all those sites.
||>You have two options. If you have made other users the site admin, as
||>we do, then all you do is erase "admin" from the line for that
||>particular site and that leaves the user you appointed administrator
||>for that site. Right? We do it for ALL the sites we have on our
||>servers because most of those folks administer their own sites or, if
||>we manage them, we go in with the specific site's username and
||>password. We NEVER use "admin" as a virtual site administrator -- to
||>confusing for us.

This sounds like a great solution to the 32 site problem, because when I FTP
to those sites I do it as that username anyway. There's only one script that
I put up as Admin so they can't modify it, and even then when I'm finished I
chown it to root just to make sure.

||>The post you referred to is another workaround if you need to
||>administer all sites yourself. Basically, you create one admin for
||>the first 25 sites and then another admin (called something like
||>admin2) for the next 25, etc. This way, you can use just two or three
||>username/password combos to get in there.

Diana is the one who wrote that post, and she wrote me off-list and
explained a few things about it. Her method is perfect for the sites where
you administer them all yourself, and her off-list explanation helped me see
that *that* wasn't what I was looking for.

||>Two remaining things to do after you've cleaned up "group":
||>
||>1 -- After you've saved the rewritten "group" file, cp it to group-
||>(that's its "shadow" file, so to speak) and that will make everything
||>active. Otherwise, you can stop and restart Apache and that will also
||>copy the file over. But, as we all know, make a backup of group
||>before you start any of this -- sinus medication or not. :-)

ROFL@sinus medication!!  (As if I'm not loopy enough, eh?)
Ahh, so *that* is how you shadow something!  That's one of those things I
always wondered about but didn't have the need to ask yet.  :)

||>2 -- Make sure that new admin owns all the files on the site or at
||>least that they're owned by httpd. Although both admin and the
||>appointed administrator have ownership privileges on the site, that
||>appointed administrator may not own some of the files if you've ftp'd
||>anything up to the site yourself while you had admin privileges for
||>the site.

*nodding*  Okey dokey. Except for that one script that I purposely leave as
root owner - the rest shouldn't be a problem.

||>I hope this isn't more confusing than the confusion.

No, actually, it's quite clear! Thank you Alfredo!

What Diana's letter made clear to me is that what I'm looking for is more
akin to the people who want users to be able to sign up for hosting and
their site is automatically made for them. Badda-bing.  *That part* actually
has nothing to do with the 32-user limit. If a client could sign up and the
site is automatically made, then I wouldn't even need my buddy to help out.
I know I've seen posts before asking about automated sign-up scripts, so
I'll go sniffing around in the archives to see what I can find out about
that. Maybe I'll be able to find something that might work one way or the
other.

Meanwhile, I've got some admins to clean out of my group file... ;)

Carrie