Re: Virtual Hosting and the FHS
On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 07:41:31PM +0200, Russell Coker wrote:
> So if the user's home directory contains their email and their web pages then
> /home is the right place!
a) it is unlikely that a mailspool for an entire domain should sit in
one particular user's homedir - even in a scenario where that might be
"not too inappropriate", I would contend that it's still just a special
case, and that we don't have a good answer for the general case yet.
b) likewise for a web site; in this case I accept that it is much more
likely that a single user will be responsible for an entire web site
than for an entire domain's mail, but I still think that this is a
special case.
Conclusion: Iff the user is entirely responsible for the entire domain's
web/mail, then you *might* be able to convince me that the users' homedirs
are the Right Place. However, I doubt that either is likely ;)
> For bulk web hosting the easiest way to create domains is to create the
> accounts in LDAP (or whatever other backend data source you use for user
> authentication). Then you can have the FTP server create home directories at
> login time (much easier than having the sign-up scripts create the
> directories and has less security issues).
I can see the attractions, but I don't think that it's a generally
applicable solution. I also think that in a situation where it would be
applicable, the admin is likely to be doing enough customisation work
that the overhead of changing the configuration is likely to be minimal.
I'm still looking for a definitive answer for the general case - I'd
be more than happy if a few people just agreed with me ;)
[for anyone who can't remember the question: in the general case, "where
should we put web content for virtual hosts?" and "where should we put
mail spools for virtual domains?" -- my suggested answer, pending changing
the FHS (ha!) to actually consider such eventualities, is "in subdirectories
of /var" (I use /var/virtmail and /var/virtwww). This appears to me to be
the most sensible option that is merely discouraged rather than downright
prohibited by the current FHS.]
Cheers,
Nick
--
Nick Phillips -- nwp@lemon-computing.com
You will soon forget this.
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