Re: Managing a mail/web server without Unix accounts

[Hirling Endre]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> I am looking for a documentation, as much detailed as possible,
> on the setup of an Internet server (mail, several domains, POP
> and IMAP, a Web server with FTP and DAV upload by customers,
> may be Zope), *without* Unix accounts. The actual database
> should be a DBMS (possibly with three-tier architectures).

> I want free software, as much as possible, and I prefer it already
> packaged. (I *can* patch Qpopper and Zope but I prefer something
> which will not force me to manage a fork.)
> 
> Apparently, there are many parts of the complete solution: PAM
>  (any list of
> PAMified apps in Debian?), LDAP , but
> no comprehensive documentation discussing pros and cons, practical
> problems, lists of applications which support it, etc.

I use exim and courier-imap/pop3 for the mailserver. Neither of these needs
patching. For webhosting I use caudium (http://caudium.net) with a few
custom modules that I wrote. The backend database is mysql (could be
postgres too).

Re: Managing a mail/web server without Unix accounts

[Hirling Endre]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> I am looking for a documentation, as much detailed as possible,
> on the setup of an Internet server (mail, several domains, POP
> and IMAP, a Web server with FTP and DAV upload by customers,
> may be Zope), *without* Unix accounts. The actual database
> should be a DBMS (possibly with three-tier architectures).

> I want free software, as much as possible, and I prefer it already
> packaged. (I *can* patch Qpopper and Zope but I prefer something
> which will not force me to manage a fork.)
> 
> Apparently, there are many parts of the complete solution: PAM
>  (any list of
> PAMified apps in Debian?), LDAP , but
> no comprehensive documentation discussing pros and cons, practical
> problems, lists of applications which support it, etc.

I use exim and courier-imap/pop3 for the mailserver. Neither of these needs
patching. For webhosting I use caudium (http://caudium.net) with a few
custom modules that I wrote. The backend database is mysql (could be
postgres too).


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Re: Managing a mail/web server without Unix accounts

[Nicolas Bougues]

Bonjour Stéphane, Hello all,

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 11:08:23AM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>   
> 
> I am looking for a documentation, as much detailed as possible, 
> on the setup of an Internet server (mail, several domains, POP 
> and IMAP, a Web server with FTP and DAV upload by customers, 
> may be Zope), *without* Unix accounts. The actual database 
> should be a DBMS (possibly with three-tier architectures).
> 

I can tell you a few words about our setup; the point is that it works
quite well, but is quite not "packaged", although it could be somewhat
more. 

Incoming mail : 
- accounts stored in a database
- "stock" postfix MTA
- "heavily patched" postfix local delivery agent, in order to check
account against database, enforce quotas on mailboxes and message
size, and to handle our "home made" spool directory : mailboxes are
basically in Maildir format, but the directory structure is somewhat
hashed to handle *lots* of users. For instance, a user spool dir could
be [EMAIL PROTECTED]/ (then cur/new/tmp maildir
stuff).

Outgoing mail : either "blind" relaying of trusted IPs, or SMTP AUTH
done with the same database.

POP/IMAP (and IMAP based webmail) : slightly patched Qmail POP and
Courier Imapd, to handle our database.

Web : apache and ftpd are "stock", but we set up a few perl scripts
that are called remotely to handle config changes. Config is stored in
a global database, and a server's httpd.conf can be regenerated in
full at anytime, if required. FTP is handled with "normal" accounts,
though.

Be aware that DAV is not very server-side scripting friendly yet :
there is no way for Apache to send a php file to a DAV client without
parsing it. The available solutions to this problem are mostly things
like creating other virtual hosts or directories (pointing to the same
space), and disabling scripting for these. And although we don't like
it much, users like Frontpage a lot, and that's what we use instead of
Dav until now, because of these problems.

Best regards,
-- 
Nicolas BOUGUES Axialys
Interactive


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Managing a mail/web server without Unix accounts

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

I am looking for a documentation, as much detailed as possible, 
on the setup of an Internet server (mail, several domains, POP 
and IMAP, a Web server with FTP and DAV upload by customers, 
may be Zope), *without* Unix accounts. The actual database 
should be a DBMS (possibly with three-tier architectures).

There are two reasons for that:

- I want the database of users to be modified by non-root people, 
from a Web interface (and I want security),
- I don't want Unix limits (even if Linux raises some) like the 
8-chars limit for the login or the maximum number of users.

I have one more demand, which is my excuse to post on debian-isp :-) 
I want free software, as much as possible, and I prefer it already 
packaged. (I *can* patch Qpopper and Zope but I prefer something 
which will not force me to manage a fork.)

Apparently, there are many parts of the complete solution: PAM 
 (any list of 
PAMified apps in Debian?), LDAP , but 
no comprehensive documentation discussing pros and cons, practical 
problems, lists of applications which support it, etc.






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