[...] > For instance, I keep all the dns and virtual server info in a mysql > database, and wrote a php front end for managing the data. I then > have a perl script that runs via cron and it checks to see if any > changes were made to the virtual server setups, if not it goes on to > the dns subrouting, if changes were made it regenerates the apache and > configs and does a graceful restart of apache (which doesn't hard cut > off existing processes/accesses). I'm using Exim as the mail server, > and it has mysql integration, so changes made to the email system are > already setup to be instant, so I don't need to do anything with that > config normally. OTOH you can do the same with Apache, too. Needs some work, but Apache can be made to read its configuration data directly from an SQL database. We have a system that does all these (mails and virtual hosts (and invoicing, affiliates, quotas, etc...) stored in a MySQL database with a user interface). We even store the DNS zones in mySQL, but unfortunately there aren't any good DNS servers that can be glued to an RDBMS :-(, so named zones are still generated using a Perl script (but first they are transformed to XML, hehe ).
> But these tools are highly unique to my own setup, and my own style of > doing things. And I'd bet that is probably the norm out there for > most hosting providers. They either do it themselves, or they hire > someone to do specifically what they want. Exactly. Anything pre-made is probably missing some very important feature you need - or if not, than your service is not unique :-) - Cs.
