Re: create_homedir 0.1 -- Comments requested

[Joe C. <jo...@sw...>]

Wil Cooley wrote:

> Also Sprach Joe Cooper:
> 
>>Cool.  I'd like to follow development of the LDAP stuff, if you don't 
>>mind posting occasional updates here.  I was going to do LDAP 
>>integration for my virtual hosting module but if you do the hard work 
>>first, I'll be happy to borrow ideas.   ;-)
>>
> 
> Well, I've been communicating with Fernando Lozano about his LDAP
> users module, which actually does about 90% of what's needed,
> so I'm hoping to just help with what he's done, but make a more
> general framework.  (One of the things I wanted was the ability to
> remotely create home directories...) I haven't done nearly enough
> LDAP or Webmin programming to say that I can certainly pull this off,
> but I'm hopeful.
> 
> What sort of things are you looking for for your virtual hosting?
> I've thought for a long time that it would be very cool if someone
> would write a mod_config_ldap, where Apache would pull configuration
> from an LDAP server.  I don't think it would be terribly hard to map
> the Apache configuration directives into LDAP objects & attributes,
> but it'd be a hell of a lot of work considering how many there are.

I haven't mapped out all of the data that will go into LDAP yet, but I 
expect quite a lot of it will--for the first 'useful' version I'd like 
to simply do things in the traditional way (with a few additions): 
Apache virts, BIND records in normal flat-files, users in the flat-file 
passwd, and Sendmail/Postfix aliases set up also in a flat-file.

For performance reasons and easier maintainability and mobility (because 
we'll hopefully be managing quite large hosting environments from a 
single master server) I'd like to be able to freely migrate between 
flat-files and a database back-end, and LDAP is a quite suitable form of 
database for this purpose.  It will be more than user information, but 
that's a good start--we'll be attaching to each username (where 
username==hosting customer name) virtual host info for all of their 
sites, DNS info, mail aliases, backup schedule and targets, monthly 
recurring service costs, maintenence schedule, redundancy and failover 
rules, /their/ virtual customers, etc.

It's all very complicated, and I haven't enough hours in the day to even 
get a start on this stuff, but it'll happen sometime...
-- 
Joe Cooper <jo...@sw...>
http://www.swelltech.com
Web Caching Appliances and Support