Dressed down DA?

villah

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Joined
Jan 2, 2004
Messages
29
We were running DA on Redhat, but the machine crashed on us severely last week so we need to rebuild it. We' re thinking of running it on FreeBSD this time, have more faith in that... now that we have a chance to build it from scratch I'd like to know if we can install DA without the following components:

- FrontPage Extensions - simply do not want to support those
- Majordomo/vm-pop/WU-IMAP/webmail - all our clients use our existing email platform
- bind - we use our existing nameservers

Would this pose any problems in running DA? I understand I can disable these features for users and use a firewall to block the ports, but I'd rather just not have any software installed that won't be used anyway.

Also, we'd like to create the httpd.conf from our main administrative platform, which will allow us to automatically create server aliasses, redirects/rewrites and so on. But I'd still like to offer users the possibility to create their own subdomains and domain redirects. Any chance this might work?

Thanks!
Hans
 
It all seems very possibly. I think we would need more details on your apache config file deal.

As for not installing parts of DA. I assume that is possible, you would need to edit the setup.sh file so it would not install it. You would also need to stop all services so you don't get errors once it is installed. You will also need to disable automatic updates, I assume that if they release a updated release it would install on your machine.
 
removal of services doesn't really matter.... im sure the removal of named has been discussed here previously with a soloution to get DA not to touch it at all.... the removal of apache configuration writing..... I would of thought thats a core feature of DA and is difficult to bypass without some additional work on the main code.... will leave John to confirm that though - frontpage should be very easy to remove, same with majordomo and webmail.. the rest... im not sure how DA would react without them!

Chris
 
Hello,

- FrontPage Extensions - simply do not want to support those
- Majordomo/vm-pop/WU-IMAP/webmail - all our clients use our existing email platform
- bind - we use our existing nameservers

Yes, you should be able to dress it down. You can remove the programs, and just set those services to "OFF" in the /usr/local/directadmin/data/admin/services.status file. As well, you'll need to edit the boot scripts for those programs (which must still exist) to look like:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0;

so that DA thinks all is well.

Thinks like bind files and email files will still be written, but with no programs to make use of them they'll have no effect.

Frontpage can be disabled by replacing:
/usr/local/frontpage/version5.0/bin/owsadm.exe with a simlar file to the script written above. Just a plecibo to take it's place.

John
 
Great! Thanks for the info! Is it also possible to use other FTP server software? I have been told by some people that Proftpd is not the most secure FTP solution out there (mildly put)...
 
Yes, you can.... if they can read the same configs that ProFTPd uses then you simply need to specify the path to the original configs and set the proftpd boot script to your other ftp server..

If it needs its own configs....... you can use the "upon domain creation / removal" scripts to write them for you.

Chris
 
villah said:
I have been told by some people that Proftpd is not the most secure FTP solution out there (mildly put)...
Really? What have they told you? Can you be specific?

We've found (and the vast majority of hosting companies have found) that ProFTPd is the most secure FTP solution for hosting providers, as it creates it's own complete environment and doesn't depend on the OS for anything.

Please let us know what you've read or heard to the contrary, and where, so we can look into the issues you've raised.

Thanks.

Jeff
 
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