Site Management

This chapter describes the functions that the Site Administrator normally performs. The Site Administrator accesses these functions from the Site Management screen on the web server. The Site Management screen has a green strip on the left side.

A Site Administrator can add or remove a site user, create a mailing list, manage disk space, back up and restore files and perform other virtual-site-related administrative tasks. A Site Administrator can manage a virtual site using any standard Web browser. To access the Site Management screen for your site, type the URL http://<sitename>/admin/ into your browser. The user interface (UI) prompts you for your site administrator username and password.

Note: The Site Management screen can only be accessed using the fully qualified site name in the Web browser. The Site Management screen is not accessible if an incomplete or aliased site host name is specified. The Site Management screen appears. From this screen, you can access the Site Administrator functions. The User Management section appears when you first access the Site Management screen. The User List displays the site users by user name in ascending order.

ADDING A USER

After you have created your site, you may now proceed to add users to your site. Adding a user to a site can essentially create an email address for the user, create an FTP login for the user, and also create a SSH login for the user depending on which options you grant to the user. In order to add a user to a site, click on the sitename that is listed under the "View All" link in the "WebSites" section. Clicking this link will bring you to a page where you can edit the settings for that specific site. On the bottom of the page will be an "Add User" section which will list already created users. Clicking the "Add User" link will take you to a page where you may enter the parameters for this new user.

• Full Name - Full name of user.


• Username - The username that you would like to set for this user.


• Password - The password that will be used for this user. This password is a general password that will apply to all services such as email (POP3/IMAP), FTP, and Shell/SSH access.


• Disk Quota - The amount of space this user can use on the underlying filesystem of the server. This will prevent the user from capitalizing all the disk space on the server.


• Remote Access - There are 3 options available, Email Only, FTP Access, and SSH/Shell/FTP Access. Email Only will setup a user whose services are limited to email only (no FTP, no SSH, no Shell). For email users only, the POP3/IMAP login will be of the format of username@hostname.domainname. Creating an FTP user will create a system user who will have FTP services in addition to email services. Creating an FTP/SSH user will create a user who will have access to email, FTP, and Shell services. FTP users and FTP/SSH users will login using the format of "username" (without the @hostname.domainname appended to it) for all services, including POP3/IMAP email services.


• Site Administrator - Enabling this option changes the ownership of all the files in the website's content to this user. This allows the user to login via SSH or FTP and make modifications or overwrite the website's content files.


• Sub-Web Folder - This form is used to change the ownership of the specified directory (located under the website's main "web/" directory) to this user. This essentially allows you to delegate the administration of a folder under your main website directory to this specific user. For example, if there is a directory under the main website called "images/", entering "images" into the Sub-Web form will change the ownership of that directory to that user. This user can then make modifications to any file under that directory although there may be a different user specified as the general site administrator.

EDITING EMAIL SETTINGS

An email alias is a setting which will allow an account to accept emails for additional email addresses. For example, creating an alias called "useralias" will make sure that emails sent to "useralias@domain.com" will be forwarded to that specific user. Alternatively, a catchall is a type of setting that will configure an account to accept emails for all non-valid users in that domain. For example abcdefgh@domain.com will normally not be a valid email address unless there is a user in that domain named "abcdefgh" (or if there is an alias created for "abcdefgh". However, enabling an account as a catchall email address will make sure that that message sent to that invalid email address will end up in this users mailbox./font>

In order to edit a users email settings, click on the site that the user belongs to. At the bottom of the page is a listing of all the currently added users. Next to each user are 3 links, "Edit", "Mail", and "Delete". Click on the "Mail" next to the user account you would like to configure the email settings for.

• Email aliases - This configures the email aliases for this account. Please enter one email alias per line without the "@domainname" appended to it.


• Forward email to - This is used to forward all emails received by this account (including aliases and catchalls) to an alternate email address.


• Catch-all - Enabling this option will activate this account as a catchall account for this domain as mentioned above.


• Autoresponder - An autoresponder will auto-reply to any received email message with a prepared message of your choice. Enabling this option will activate this account as an autoresponder and will reply with the message that you enter in the text box underneath.
• Spamfilter - Enabling this option will filter all incoming mail through a spamfilter before delivering locally to the user. Please note, that this option is only available, if the server administrator enabled the "spam filter" option for this domain. For the configuration of the filter, click on the item labeled "Email Filtering" in the menu to the left.

DELETING A USER

Click on the site you would like to delete a user to from the View Sites Area. Click "Delete" next to the user you would like to delete. This will delete the user from the system (including all email, FTP, and shell settings).

Adding/Editing a mailing list

Name - Name of the mailing list (name@domain.com). Do not include the @domain.com.

Owner - This is the e-mail address that will be the list owner.

Password - Password for remote administration.

List Options

• Archived - Keeps old messages archived
• Digest - Sets up listname-digest. Defaults for digest: 30 messages, 48 hours, or 64 kbytes of message body text have accumulated since the last digest.
• Prefix - Adds text before the subject of every email with the specified text.
• Guard - Archive access requests from unrecognized SENDERs will be rejected. This restriction is safe, since replies are sent to the SENDER address.
• Indexed - Maintain a message index of incoming messages.
• Moderated - Postings must first be approved by by moderator.
• Others rejected - Allow only moderators to post to a list (aka. read-only for subscribers).
• Public - Allows administrative requests and archive retrieval.
• Private - Will allow only digest creation, remote administration, and archive retrieval by remote administrators.
• Remote Admin - Moderator(s) can unsubscribe and subscribe any address.
• Moderated Subscription - Moderators must approve subscriptions.
• Trailer - Adds a footer to the end of every email.
• Subscriber-only Posting - Only allow postings from subscribers of the list, digest, or added manually to the address database.
• Extra - Strip annoying mime parts such as excel, rtf text, html text from messages. Messages consisting solely of this content-type will be rejected.

Add / Remove subscribers (edit only)

Here you can add and delete users from the list. You can perform both operations with one update. When adding users you need to enter in a list of addresses, one per line. When removing users you can enter in an address manually and also select from the list. Hold down the shift key to select multiple addresses to remove.

Template Editor

This will let you edit the template messages sent out by the list. Please consult the ezmlm documentation for the purpose of each template.

FTP FAQ
Question: I used to be able to log into my machine, but now I get a username/password pair invalid message. How do I solve this?

Answer:
This is normally a bad sign. If you have no recollection of changing your passwords and are now getting messages that your username/password pair is invalid, please make sure that you are typing in the username and password correctly. If you are sure that the passwords have been entered correctly, please contact Host-Island.com support to have a technician investigate into the issue. The problem can be caused by various different elements ranging from a security compromise of your server to disk usage problems.

drwxr-xr-x    2 username site1       4096 Apr 19 15:15 images
drwxr-xr-x    2 username site1       4096 Apr 19 15:15 includes
-rw-r--r--    1 username site1        647 Apr 19 15:15 index.php
-rw-r--r--    1 username site1       2003 Apr 19 15:15 introduction.php

WEB SERVER FAQ

Question: I tried going to my web site, and I got an error stating, "Directory Index Forbidden". What does this mean?

Answer:
This error usually occurs when you do not have an index.html file placed in your document root directory. Placing a index.htm, index.html, or index.php file in your document root will eliminate this error. If you place a file in your document root, and you are continuing to get this error, it usually means that you are placing the file in the wrong place. Please verify that you are indeed uploading your files to the correct directory on the server.

1. Do not change ".htaccess" files that belong to the Frontpage Server Extensions. You can verify if a file is a Frontpage ".htaccess" file by opening it, and looking for any occurrence of Frontpage that is not your own.
   
   
2. Password protecting a directory, will also password protect any sub-directories. If this is something that needs to be avoided, please move your sub-directories out of the password protected directory as needed.

1. "System-user"
   This is probably the easiest to implement. Just insert the following into the ".htaccess" file.
   

   AuthName "My Authentication"

   AuthType Basic

   require valid-users

   
   
2. "System-group"
   This scheme implements authentication by requiring the username to be a part of a certain group (e.g. site1).
   

   AuthName "My Authentication"

   AuthType Basic

   require group site1

   
   
3. "Virt-user"
   This is perhaps the most defficult of the 3. This requires you to set up each individual user in a separate password file from the system password files. This separate password file can be created using the "htpasswd" command native to the Apache distribution.
   

   AuthName "My Authentication"

   AuthType Basic

   AuthUserFile /path/to/a/file/called/.htpasswd

   require valid-user

   
   Now that you have your .htaccess file all set up, you now need to create the .htpasswd file. Log into your machine with ssh, and cd into the directory that you want to protect. Once in that directory, you must type the following command.

   htaccess -c .htpasswd user1

   
   Please note, you should only use the "-c" flag if you are first creating a file. If the file already exists and you are just adding addition users to the file, the "-c" option can be omitted. Also, please be sure to substitute "user1" with the username that you would like to set. Once you type this in, you will be prompted for a passwd. If all goes well, return back to your web browser and reload the page. You should be greeted with an authentication prompt. Type in your username and password that you just set to gain access to the directory.

1. Contact Host-Island.com Support Team..