Topic: Two domains possible

[Tor]

Hi,

In a scenario we have two companies: company-a.com and company-b.com  They would like to share an internet connection via an e-smith server-gateway BUT have separate email and web domains.  

That means each company have their *separate* user folders and web / ibays folders on the server and that they don't have access to each other's data unless granted.  The username john may occur under company-a and company-b but they are separate users.

Can e-smith / SME be configured like this?  It seems to me that virtual domains doesn't allow this.

regards

Tor

[Bobby]

Tor,

With some tweaking and log-in scripts you can accomplish most of this with e-Smith.  the one thing I don't think you can do easily is the mail system where user@company-a.com is different than user@company-b.com

I have done this with a custom instalation of Linux and a different mail server, so it can be done, just not out-of-the-box.

/B

[Tor]

Thanks

I understand that it is definately no solution for a newbie, and that's what I needed to know...

regards

Tor

[Tom Carroll]

I am very interested in this same topic.  I have been using my SME server for over a year now and I am very pleased with it's functional capabilities - to a point.  I have a need to host two domains on one machine.  That would be two valid domains with their own IP addresses.  I explored the virtual domain scenerio and it will not work because there is a possibility of duplicate user names, such as support@domain1.com (IP 123.456.789.001) and support@domain2.com (IP 123.456.789.002).  I have pretty much come to the conclusion this is not possible and I will have to run two seperate servers to keep the two domains on their own IP and have the ability to host same user names for each system.

If there is a way to do this, I have not found any good answers to accomplish it.

If anyone knows how this can be done, I would greatly appreciate any tips or pointers to a how-to or some reading.

Thanks!

Tom Carroll
Dataware Computers

[Dan Brown]

Tom, as you probably know, there's no inherent reason that these two domains need to have separate IP addresses unless you need to do SSL on both of them.

It is possible to do what you describe on a single server, but it's quite a bit outside of the design spec for e-smith/SME.  You could probably do it on a single server based on SME, but you'd be undoing a lot of the work that makes SME SME.

[Les Mikesell]

The easiest approach would be to use 2 PC's: on for the gateway and company a and the other in server-only mode for company b.  If you can get multiple IP addresses from the ISP providing the internet line, run them both as gateways and everything will just work.  If you have to share a single 'real' IP address you will have to make some custom changes to make the gateway machine forward email to the 2nd server, and you would probably have to give someone in company b an account on the gateway machine to maintain their web site.   Or, company b might use ISP-hosted email and web service so they would only need a local gateway.

[Tom Carroll]

One reason I two distinc IP's on one server with two unique domains is because of reverse DNS issues that come up, along with the SSL problem.

The whole reason I'm thinking of going to two servers is the issue of making SME what SME isn't.

Thanks for the feed back Dan!

[Tom Carroll]

Les, this is probably what I am going to do.  I can just place the one (company b) server as a server only mode.  I will not need it connected to any internal lan since it will be a hosted only machine anyway.

It is the only way around having my cake and to taste it at least! ;->

Thanks!