Topic: Turn my e-smith box into an Webhosting-ISP

[Kenneth]

Hello everyone,

I got myself a pentium II 450mhz box, with  512 megs of ram, two 18gb HDDs, and 4 isa etherlink cards. (all I could find in my house was ISA etherlinks)

I decided that I already have a workstation, so I decided to load e-smith on the box (only e-smith is worthy of this equipment). Now I would like to turn it into a webhosting server. And I have a few questions:

1. How could I set up each users directory so they could only use a set amount of space (100mbs) and they could not get out of there folder (ie, deny read/write access to everyone elses folders)

2. How do I set up alaised IP's on e-smith (I would like to create virtual servers with apache and set them to their own ip. Also the document root would be the folder metioned above)

3. How do I set esmith to use 4 network cards and make them all outgoing (this server won't be used as a proxy)

4. Is there any good tutorials out there on howto become a webhosting provider?

I thank you for your help. I also thank dan for creating the php/mysql/imp rpms. It was those rpms that gave me the idea to become a php/mysql webhosting provider.

I just want to try this out for a while, if it works out I'll give free webhosting to the people who helped me. If it doesn't you'll see a pentiumII 450 box for sale on ebay

Kenneth

[Garret]

Guess I'll jump in here and try.

1. I'm not really sure how to do this one other than a CGI or perl script, probably even a couple of PHP scripts. Plenty of those that will allow what you are talking about. Try http://www.cgi-resources.com.

2.You can run anynumber of diferent websites off of e-smith by creating IBAYS and then creating virtual domains that use the IBAYS. I CGI will allow you to create subdomains off of yours like www.youhost.com/guest account.

3. Not exactly sure why you would need four NIC cards. Could you expand upon this?

4. I don't know about the tutorials for sure, but is seems that someone is always trying to tell others how to do stuff, as in this case:-}

Garret

[Kenneth]

Hello Garret,

Thank you for your reply, I need four network cards because I would like to offer virtual ip addresses to my users, each network card could only handle so many ip's.

Kenneth

[Garret]

Why is it important to set it up with IP address as opposed to Domains? If I'm right there is no limit on the number of virtual domains.
I'm thinking that if you're stuck on using IP address, and a nic will only handle so many, you may have to bring in other boxes and use port forwarding.

[Kenneth]

Ok then,

What I need is the users home directory to be the apache document root.
The problem with virtual domains is the fact that they connect domains, to ibays. The whole reason I wanted ip's was becuase I wanted to setup apache virtual servers. But I see that e-smith makes it sooo easy, It was right in front of me all the time.

I think I am going to make the users home directory in there IBAY. (The reson for wanting to combine the two is the fact that it is two hard to keep up with the users folder and there ibay)

I must sound like a crazy fool, but in the end I think it might just work.

PS I'm ripping webmin apart to try and take some of the useful features (such as quota) and put them into my own version of the an e-smith comapatable webmin.


Kenneth