Re: [webmin-l] Virtualmin Professional

[Freddie C. <fca...@sd...>]

> On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 13:52, Craig White wrote:
>> On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 17:01 -0500, Joe Cooper wrote:
>> ----
>> I'm going to try to keep this a little more tightly defined as you
>> have enough on your plate.

>> Much of my point involves 'real users' vs. 'virtual users' - Those
>> with a shell and a home directory and those that don't have a shell
>> or a home directory. The user db being /etc/passwd or sqldb or
>> sasldb or ldap db

>> Sieve - If you were familiar with Horde/IMP/Ingo in it's current
>> incarnation, you would understand. It's virtually out of the box set
>> up so that users can maintain their own filters, set their own
>> vacation replies, blacklists, whitelists, and 'fileinto' folders.
>> Unlike procmail, user doesn't need to have a shell account at all.

>> I used procmail for a few years and I liked it. Ingo (part of the
>> Horde project) does interface with it and is probably the best
>> example I have seen of making procmail user friendly. When I migrated
>> to cyrus-imapd, sieve was part of the migration and it's simple
>> enough - in fact, not as powerful as procmail but it has none of the
>> overhead of procmail either.

>> Cyrus - LDAP - virtual users, no shell account whatsoever.
>> Mailstore is complete in it's own tree and not spread in user
>> directories. Virtual users don't have home directories to maintain.
>> Cyrus scales - with it's murder architecture, you can spread the load
>> among servers. Cyrus has shared mailboxes, public mailboxes, quotas.
>> Dovecot - for all it's features clearly isn't in the same league.

>> I have to believe that you have chosen dovecot for your pop/imap
>> server because you really aren't familiar with cyrus-imapd (or
>> ldap).

>> I guess when I see so many large installations of universities and
>> corporations using cyrus-imapd, horde/imp, it seems to be an
>> indication of their assessment of the performance, scalability and
>> feature sets that some people do want.

>> Now if your target is the virtual hosting companies serving 15-30
>> domains and 500-3000 users, perhaps these issues are less important.

> My feeling is that the choice between LDAP-based mail systems and
> those that use Unix accounts is a matter of philosophy, and of what
> you want users to be able to do. Pure virtual users are great if you
> are just talking about mailboxes, but if you want users to be able to
> have home pages and FTP access, then they need to have Unix accounts.
> Virtualmin is targeted more towards web hosting than running masses of
> mailboxes, so I think that the Unix user approach is the way to go.

Actually, you don't need any real Unix user accounts for a webhosting
setup.  All you need is an FTP daemon that groks user accounts stored
in SQL, LDAP, or whatnot.  This is a configuration we've been using
for quite sometime now.  Pureftpd, Postfix, Courier-IMAP, MySQL,
Apache.  The only system users with account info in /etc/passwd are
the server admins.  Everybody else has virtual accounts.  When they
connect via FTP (login using their e-mail address), they are locked
into the www/ directory for their domain.  When they connect via IMAP
or POP, they can only view their own messages (login using their full
e-mail address).  Works like a charm.

If I grok'd LDAP, it'd work even better using Cyrus-IMAP.  But, for
the 60 domains and ~300 IMAP accounts running on that server, it works
really well.

> That said, it is actually quite flexible - you can opt to use
> Qmail+LDAP as a mail server, and it will create mailboxes as LDAP
> users who do not necessarily even have to be Unix users. You can then
> take advantage of all the features of LDAP and Cyrus, such as
> clustering, IMAP-based mail readers and so on..

--=20
Freddie Cash, CCNT CCLP        Helpdesk / Network Support Tech.
School District 73             (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
fc...@sd...               hel...@sd...