For the past couple of days I've been working on some "easy hosting" setup for Debian. This is a continuation of my shell-script based solution, but intended to be much more dynamic.

The system makes it simple for us to deploy a Debian Etch installation, and allow users to create virtualhosts easily. (And by easily I mean by creating directories, and very little else.)

So, for example, to create a new website simple point the IP address of your domain example.org to the IP of your machine. Then run:

mkdir -p /srv/example.com/cgi-bin
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/htdocs

If you then want to allow FTP access to upload you may run:

echo "mysecretpass" > /srv/example.com/ftp-password

This will give you FTP access, username "example.com", password "mysecretpass". You'll be chrooted into the /srv/example.com/ directory.

All of this is trivial. Via Apache's mod_vhost_alias, and a simple script to split logfiles and generate statistics via webalizer for each domain. The only thing that I really needed to do was to come up with a simple shell script & cron entry to build up an FTP password file for pure-ftpd.

So here's where it gets interesting. The next job, obviously, is to handle mail for the domains. Under Debian it should be a matter of creating an appropriate /etc/exim/exim4.conf - and ignoring the rest of the setup.

I'm getting some help with that, because despite knowing almost too much about SMTP these days I'm still a little hazy on Exim4 configuration.

I'm watching the recent debian configuration packages system with interest, because right now I'm not touching any configuration files I'm sure that it is only a matter of time.

In other news I cut prices, and am seeing a lot of interest in my mail-scanning.

Finally my .emacs file has been tweaked a lot over the previous few days. Far too much fun. (support files.)

Tags: apache2, exim4, mail-scanning, pure-ftpd, virtual hosting | 2 comments