Hi,
We're in the middle of testing out various control panels for a hosting solution we're putting up. We've hit a few bugs concerning our network/systems design decisions and DirectAdmin.
Basically, we want to be running e-mail and web hosting on seperate servers. Is this easily doable with DirectAdmin ? We'd basically split off Web to one side, and put the DirectAdmin panel / E-mail on the other server. Now, i'm asking if it's easy to do, because the way I see it, i'm going to have to trick DirectAdmin into thinking web hosting is installed and it's server, while the real apache server is going to run elsewhere. Luckily, both servers will be link via a 2nd network interface and i'll export NFS shares from there for the web config files and customer sites so that DirectAdmin can see them and modify them. I'll then compile a custom Apache installation on the second server with the proper values for sysconfdir and the modules which will be installed. The only trouble I see with this solution is the Linux NFS server headaches and restarting Apache from the DirectAdmin panel won't work anymore.
Also, I see that we can't put the servers in a DMZ. This is a possible show stopper, as I don't really want to put the servers directly on the Internet. Initially, our network design called for a PIX firewall which would have a DMZ interface, and using one-to-one mappings, I would have assigned a single external adresse to each server. Since we can't really install DirectAdmin on a server using internal addresses, this seems to be out of the question. Are there going to be modifications to the licensing schemes so that this becomes possible in the future, even if the cost is more than a normal unlimited license ?
Finally, we want to make the panel be served through a HTTPS connection. This implies that we'll procure a SSL Certificate. However, the certificate will be assigned to a specific hostname. This causes problems with the fact that DirectAdmin publicizes to customers that they can access the panel from https://www.theirdomain.com:2222/ when in fact, they'll have to use https://panel.oriso.com:2222/ as the correct addresse to match the certificate and not get a popup about the certificate being invalid. Is there a way to make DirectAdmin publicize only this address ? And more, is there a way, other than manually adding a redirect from the user's virtual host to our own panel to make DirectAdmin only accept connection on this hostname (Bind it to a named base virtual host with the default behavior on port 2222 being to simply redirect to this host) ?
Sorry for the long post and the probably impossible to answer questions. We like the product a lot more than the other offerings (Ensim, Cpanel or Plesk) and I wouldn't be asking if we weren't strongly considering it.
We're in the middle of testing out various control panels for a hosting solution we're putting up. We've hit a few bugs concerning our network/systems design decisions and DirectAdmin.
Basically, we want to be running e-mail and web hosting on seperate servers. Is this easily doable with DirectAdmin ? We'd basically split off Web to one side, and put the DirectAdmin panel / E-mail on the other server. Now, i'm asking if it's easy to do, because the way I see it, i'm going to have to trick DirectAdmin into thinking web hosting is installed and it's server, while the real apache server is going to run elsewhere. Luckily, both servers will be link via a 2nd network interface and i'll export NFS shares from there for the web config files and customer sites so that DirectAdmin can see them and modify them. I'll then compile a custom Apache installation on the second server with the proper values for sysconfdir and the modules which will be installed. The only trouble I see with this solution is the Linux NFS server headaches and restarting Apache from the DirectAdmin panel won't work anymore.
Also, I see that we can't put the servers in a DMZ. This is a possible show stopper, as I don't really want to put the servers directly on the Internet. Initially, our network design called for a PIX firewall which would have a DMZ interface, and using one-to-one mappings, I would have assigned a single external adresse to each server. Since we can't really install DirectAdmin on a server using internal addresses, this seems to be out of the question. Are there going to be modifications to the licensing schemes so that this becomes possible in the future, even if the cost is more than a normal unlimited license ?
Finally, we want to make the panel be served through a HTTPS connection. This implies that we'll procure a SSL Certificate. However, the certificate will be assigned to a specific hostname. This causes problems with the fact that DirectAdmin publicizes to customers that they can access the panel from https://www.theirdomain.com:2222/ when in fact, they'll have to use https://panel.oriso.com:2222/ as the correct addresse to match the certificate and not get a popup about the certificate being invalid. Is there a way to make DirectAdmin publicize only this address ? And more, is there a way, other than manually adding a redirect from the user's virtual host to our own panel to make DirectAdmin only accept connection on this hostname (Bind it to a named base virtual host with the default behavior on port 2222 being to simply redirect to this host) ?
Sorry for the long post and the probably impossible to answer questions. We like the product a lot more than the other offerings (Ensim, Cpanel or Plesk) and I wouldn't be asking if we weren't strongly considering it.