sub-server question

Virtualmin
1

hello all -

is it possible to use the very cool and useful sub-server option and have each sub-server have a unique user?

from what i can see, the default is the parents username.

ideally i would like to see each sub-server be almost identical to just an ordinary stand-alone server, except have them all under the parents directory like so:

/home/parentdomain.com/domains/subserverdomainOne.com
/home/parentdomain.com/domains/subserverdomainTwo.com

but right away, i noticed that parentdomain.com “owns” everything in the domains directory, so i am resorting to just making them all stand-alone ordinary servers.

in other words, i want to go into (for example):
/home/parentdomain.com/domains/subserverdomainOne.com/public_html

and when i do an “ls -l” see something like:
-rw-r–r-- 1 subserverdomainone.com subserverdomainone.com 1234 index.html

where subserverdomainone.com is the group and the owner.

i hope this is not asking too much of virtualmin, but it seems like its a rare day to discover something that virtualmin wont do and do very well.

2

It is the prime feature of subservers to share the administrative user with the parent. :slight_smile: Asking to change that is quite like wanting a TV set, but not to watch films. :wink:

If you need individual owner users, you need to make top-level servers. All you could do is create e.g. FTP access users in your sub-server. Depends on what the user is supposed to be able to do.

Why exactly would you want sub-servers with individual owner users?

3

hey locutus -

i thought it was exceptionally cool to be able to “group” VS’s in some manner. i had hoped that sub-servers might have been a way to do just that.

i was really amazed when i could create a parent VS and then not only have alias’es but also sub-servers too. and i could easily tell the difference from the child VS indentation under the parents name.

but as far as your analogy goes, its more like wanting a TV set and then watching ‘duck dynasty’ :wink:

4

Well theoretically you can “group” virtual servers, since you can configure where their home directories should be located.

But I’d not really advise doing that, except there’s a pressing reason. :slight_smile:

5

the only “pressing” reason is once you get many VS’s, administration of all those names can get a bit unwieldy. i had hoped there might be some easy way to “categorize” them.

or is that thought for a future release ?

(is that a pressing enough reason, to be tidy ??)

6

Ooh, I certainly like to be tidy too. :slight_smile: So the general idea to have a nested directory structure for virtual servers is not bad! There’s a few caveats and pitfalls though, related to Linux file system access rights.

E.g. when you have write access to a directory, you can always delete stuff that’s in it, even if you don’t have read or write access to that stuff. Also, if you’re the owner of a directory, you can always modify the access rights.

So it’d be nice, but it’s all but trivial to implement nested directories for virtual servers that do not share the admin user, in a secure and reliable way.