Some pre-sales questions re: subdomains... etc.

Help! (Home for newbies)
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---- Usage question:
I’m building a site for a non-profit organization that is the parent of a bunch of sub-organizations (clubs). They want the ability to offer web hosting to their clubs.

Many of their clubs already have web sites. They have 185 clubs, and 30 of them have their own websites now. They want to offer the ability to have those clubs come on board on their server… These ones will already have a domain name they will want to point over.

A good number of the other clubs will likely jump at the chance to get online. They currently don’t have domains, and likely don’t care about getting one.

In the account-setup process, lets say that a club is called BobsClub - and he has no domain name.

If the parent organization (lets say they are foo.org for now) wanted to let Bobs Club come online and have a subdomain, could I rig up Virtualmin so we could just type in "bobsclub.foo.org" as the domain and have it put the entry into my BIND server for me?

What if later on down the road, Bob’s club decided they wanted to get bobsclub.org and have it point to the same site? How hard would it be to add that in after-the-fact?

– Configuration Question: BIND servers

I’m running RHEL 5 on my server. I’ve got several xen instances on it, and will be running my BIND server on a Xen instance. I take it I install virtualmin on the place that will be doing the web serving, and then do I install webmin on the BIND servers? Should I set up 2 BIND server instances, or just 1 BIND server and map 2 IPs to it?

– Custom scripted installs

I like the web editor that you have in Virtualmin. It’s probably perfect for many of the clubs to be able to put simple stuff online. More advanced clubs are going to want to have a version of Wordpress installed. I’m going to develop my own custom theme for Wordpress for them. How hard is it to customize the install scripts for things like wordpress to have it install my customized version of it and possibly dump some content in the mysql database at the same time?

----- License question:

Is there any non-profit price break?

Ryan

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In the account-setup process, lets say that a club is called BobsClub - and he has no domain name.

If the parent organization (lets say they are foo.org for now) wanted to let Bobs Club come online and have a subdomain, could I rig up Virtualmin so we could just type in "bobsclub.foo.org" as the domain and have it put the entry into my BIND server for me?

Trivial. Virtualmin doesn’t care about names. bobsclub.foo.org is just the same as bobsclub.org from a technical standpoint (OK, it is possible to have the bobsclub record be part of the foo.org zone or a separate zone…but that’s a niggling technical detail that you almost certainly don’t care about).

What if later on down the road, Bob's club decided they wanted to get bobsclub.org and have it point to the same site? How hard would it be to add that in after-the-fact?

Also pretty easy. Create an Alias for the new name, or rename the domain.

I'm running RHEL 5 on my server. I've got several xen instances on it, and will be running my BIND server on a Xen instance. I take it I install virtualmin on the place that will be doing the web serving, and then do I install webmin on the BIND servers? Should I set up 2 BIND server instances, or just 1 BIND server and map 2 IPs to it?

You only need one BIND, if it’s all running on one machine anyway. No sense wasting all those resources on pretending like your server is actually two servers. There are good reasons to virtualize, but running two virtualized name servers on one machine is not one of them.

I’ll assume you’ve seen the DNS Slaves configuration guide in the Documentation for how to set things up, since you know you only need Webmin on the DNS slave.

How hard is it to customize the install scripts for things like wordpress to have it install my customized version of it and possibly dump some content in the mysql database at the same time?

Very easy if you have Webmin module development experience. Pretty easy if you have any Perl experience. Moderate difficulty without Perl experience (but some programming knowledge in any scripting language), you can probably wrap your head around it in an afternoon or two. We’re happy to answer questions.

Is there any non-profit price break?

Early Adopter pricing is the same for everyone (it’s already 50% off of the retail price). Early Adopters also get a bonus year, which is another ~33% savings, since you don’t have to renew for two years. We’ll have non-profit pricing in place once the Early Adopter period ends, but pricing will never be as low for anyone as it is right now (except maybe in large bulk purchases).