On 5/17/05, John Meier <john.meier at gmail.com> wrote: > > I was given a nice little compaq server - a DL360, dual 1.2 GHz with a gig > of ram and about 80Gb of user drive space. I'm most familiar with Gentoo, > so I thought about installing that and loading up with apache and vsftp. > Each user would get an account and they could ftp to their home dir and > apache wuld serve out of the home dirs.... The convention is actually to have a directory called "public_html" under a user's home directory which gets shared out. This allows the user to have some "working" space outside of their DocumentRoot. I would *highly* suggest that you don't use ftp. It's an old, insecure protocol that should have died many years ago :-) Instead, you should use scp...if you're not familiar with it, it works basically the same as ftp, only it works over ssh, so you only have to have the ssh and web ports open on that box. If you're concerned about giving your users full shell access, there's a pseudo sheel called scponly that you can use to limit what commands your users have access to. It's in portage if you end up using Gentoo. > Sound about right? Any tools of modules that anyone would recommend for > the task? I tried searching sourceforge/google - but I don't even know what > you'd call this type of software/tool.. I'm not sure about specific tools to help manage this, but unless you're talking about hosting many, many sites, it's not all that hard to do by hand. Gentoo has their webapp-config tool which is supposedly able to help out with vhost configuration. I've never used it, though...as I like to do things by hand. Oh - and there *is* a non-free (beer or speech) application called cPanel that would probably work for you if you don't mind forking out some dough. I hope this answers your questions...I have quite a bit of experience webhosting on gentoo, so let me know if you have any more issues. -Erik