Shell accounts for multiple domains on one box

[Stephen R Laniel <steve@laniels.org>]

I've recently been doing some work for an IT consultancy
that's dabbling in hosting, but they don't seem to have
their procedures down cleanly. They host quite a number of
domains, and user@domain.com has to log in as
user-domain-com; users are confused by this, leading to no
end of troubles.

What's the canonical solution (I assume there must be one by
now) for hosting multiple domains on one machine if you
allow shell access? I'd like this to be as transparent to
the user as possible. Ideally, every service they run would
be domain-aware: sshing to larry@foo.com would produce a
different result than sshing to larry@domain.com. Likewise
for imapd, their MTA, Apache and so forth.

Also, I'd like larry@domain.com to have home directory
/home/domain.com/larry, and for all users within domain.com
to only have access to other directories under
/home/domain.com; perhaps all users within domain.com would
be members of the group 'domain.com'.

Finally, can the folks on this list point me to any good
books/websites for those of us who already know our Linux
very well, but are just getting started with these sorts
of scaling issues?

Thanks very much,
Steve

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/