$Id: README,v 1.2 2000/10/22 04:11:11 raju Exp $ VishwaKarma A control panel for virtual hosting providers Virtual hosting is the process of serving multiple domains from a single computer for http, ftp and mail services. As the number of IP addresses available lessens, hosting providers are looking at doing ``soft'' virtual hosting, i.e. configuring multiple virtual hosts on a single IP address. This process creates many issues for the hosting provider. VishwaKarma, the Control Panel is a means of setting up and managing multiple name-based (i.e. soft) virtual hosts on a single server through a web interface. Multiple levels of authorisation are built in. Some of the functionality available at each level is: System Manager -------------- - Create/Delete resellers - Assign disk quotas to resellers Reseller -------- - Create/Modify/Delete domains - Assign disk quotas to individual domains from her own quota - Define properties of domains (e.g. frontpage/mysql support, web stats, etc) Domain Owner ------------ - Unix cmdline and restricted ftp access to update web pages - Manage e-mail accounts E-mail account holder --------------------- - Change e-mail password - Determine disposition of e-mail (local delivery, forward and/or auto-reply) FEATURES -------- Some of the features of VishwaKarma include: - Cascading authority Each level of authority has access to all the functionality available at all levels below. E.g. Reseller can do everything that Domain Owner can do, while Domain Owner can do everything that E-mail account holder can do. - LDAP-based No need to create system accounts for e-mail users. Uses a hacked gnu-pop3d to auth POP3 users using LDAP and access mail files from home directories. - Works with standard Linux packages Uses standard Linux OpenLDAP, named, Apache HTTPD, sendmail, etc. - Uses stylesheets Styles easily customisable through the use of a single CSS. - Automatic updates SUID Perl program makes all necessary changes to system files, user does not need to login to shell at any time. Security NOT tested yet, needs to be tightened. - Well-commented code I'm a hacker, so all my documentation is in the form of comments :-) - Domain parking Permits parking of one domain on another (e.g. ganwaar.org is the same as ganwaar.com and serves the same content). - Reseller/Owner Branding Permits PNG images and/or HTML branding on pages. TODO ---- Please see the file TODO in this distribution. INSTALLATION ------------ Please see the file INSTALL in this distribution. AUTHOR ------ Raju Mathur COPYRIGHT --------- Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, Raju Mathur LICENSE ------- Please see the file COPYING which is part of this distribution. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the file COPYING (included with this distribution) or the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. CREDITS ------- Thanks go to the following: - Abhijat Paliwal of PALCOM (http://www.palcomonlinenet.net/) for moral support and permitting use of his systems for testing. Special thanks to PALCOM for reasons too numerous to list here. - Jai Bansal of Biz Net India (http://www.jaiz.com/) for more moral support and allowing Betas on his running server. - Rajnish Malhotra of Net Soft (http://www.netsoftindia.com/) for Beta testing and Beta testing permissions. - G P Singh of Delhinet (http://www.delhinet.com/) for initiating this idea in the first place. Too bad it didn't work out, but I (and all users of this software) still owe you. - Gaurav Sabharwal. He knows why. Send me a mail if you see this, Gaurav, so I know where you are! - Aparna Jha, currently serving her sentence as my spouse, for moral support, encouragement and all the frustrating times she tried to talk to me when I was working on the package and getting monosyllabic replies in return. - Shiv Jha Mathur and Aishwarya Jha Mathur, my children, for moral support and picking out typos. Without them this project would have been completed in a quarter of the time and been one-tenth of the fun it was :-)