few basic ISPC newbie questions

Hi to all of you, I have few basic post-installation questions:
I'm struggling with user creation - I just can't follow the logic and terminology of ISPC... I think I have few users more than I should have. Please allow me to describe my situation:
I have started one community several years ago. At begging as a small site which I managed by hand, than I wrote basic CMS. Community have grown up, so I switched to provider with cPanel... later to virtual host with DirectAdmin and I developed larger CMS. Now I need a lot of space, and my community don't have enough funds for managed server, and I need to host only three domains... And I'm not the best in linux, I have to admit.
In my ("gui")brain I'm thinking that I have to create user as first step, than assign him domain and ftp privileges, and than I can, as a new user with domain, create e-mail accounts, ftp accounts... he will be "placed" in /home/user with his own directories.
It is just O.K if my new user will be in /srv/www/"web#"..? Is my user "web#"?
So, I have created Reseller and entered Web address http://some.web/ ... nothing happened. Than I had to create client for that reseller to be able to create site with domain some.web ...and than I can't login to ftp with user of some.web... ouch.
Something is wrong. And yes - I'm confused as this letter is confusing. sorry.

 

I guess you haven't read the manual, did you?

When logged in as reseller or admin, first step is creating a new customer. A customer can be assigned webs which are created in a seperate step either with the main menu or within the second tab of the edit customer form.
Within a web you can then add email accounts. You can mark one email account per web as "administrator" who can login via ftp to the web's home dir. The other accounts only have access to their own homedirs which are located in the web's users subdir.

 

Oh yes, I did read the manual. as pdf. and printed it out. read as book before sleep and as news for breakfast. and highlighted some parts. and I must be really stupid. or I used to manage site in some other order...

So, I have first to create site for some customer, than, for that site, I can create the owner? (that's sound like reverse engineering to me and that might be a problem...)

I don't get that... homedirectories for e-mail accounts under user (client or site?) directory?
Don't get me wrong - I'm sure that ISPC will work for me, I just have to meet it's logic-path. I mean - if we already have assigned some quota for some client, and than for his site, why are we allowed to modify that amount later in user&email control panel? or is that some other quota? why should user of some site had some disk quota? web space limit? I understood mail-account quota, but web... no, I just don't get it.

and, btw - I can't find phpMyAdmin's link. It is installed, but (yet) I couldn't find it's link or load it via uri.

or... to go simple - can I, as admin, create 3 sites (domain.tld, myhome.web, blabla.dot) assign to each one admin account (user&email+admin checkbox) and latter, if I wish to, add some e-mail account...? I haven't find the way to do that.

...but all I have is "Customer: option value=No client available."

tnx for any help!

 

Take good care of your printout in your bed.. you know it's under age....

The structure looks like admin -> reseller -> customer -> email/ftp user . So don't confuse the terms, although in business a reseller may be a customer in your eyes. Just stick with ISPConfig's terms.

The only config panels I really know besides ISPConfig are Confixx and Plesk, so I know it can be a bit confusing at first. I don't get the point in having homedirs with ftp access for email users as well. I just don't think about it and so they do not get in my way If I remember right Till wants to seperate that in a future version or at least add a global option to change the default behaviour.

Have a look at the ISPConfig website. You'll find a page "Download" with tools & add-ons for ISPConfig and there you'll find phpMyAdmin. The link will get displayed under "tools" in ISPConfig.

The quota stuff.. I'm not sure (after only two months with ISPConfig but having migrated more than a dozen of customers mit twice as many domains).. I only use the setting for web's and leave the single user quotas at -1 (unlimitd). I'm pretty sure that means "all the space that is available in this web", meaning that mail, database, web, log and user dirs may never accumulate to more than what you set as the web's limit.

If you want to have three sites with on admin account each, just create each site, select the site, go to "User & E-Mail", add an account, turn on the "Administrator" checkbox and you're done. You can add additional email accounts whenever you wish to.

P.S.:
Maybe what I refer to as web is called "site" in the English version

 

O.K... slow now
for quotas - I have found explanation (rtfm all the way to the appendix. including appendix! )
but now, allow me to ask few questions (you AlArenal, or anyone else)...
1 - under ISP Server cp (control panel), what is meant by "Host" (in de) or "Hostname" (in en)?
2 - how can I manage "Domain" entered in that same ISP Server cp?
3 - in ISP Anbieter / ISP Reseller cp, what is for "Internet" field (in de) or "Web address" (in en)? same goes for ISP Kunde / ISP Client cp.
4 - naming resellers/clients and "their users" ...at this moment it is tough for me even to form this question... If I understood manual correctly, I don't have to create reseller to be able to create client(s) who will "hold" a site. If I create client with name "adam", is it wise to create site titled "adam" in next step (following tab!) with title "adam", admin-user with username "adam"...? will there be too many adams? should I add some "eva" somewhere sometime?
5 - tnx in advance

 

1. Well, the host is what stands in front of the domain name. Usually this is "www". Technically it's a subdomain and this is how you create one in ISPConfig. Consider having a domain "mydomain.com" and want to create a subdomain "test", then you would type "test" in the field host and "mydomain.com" in the domain field.

2. Uhm.. you enter den [domainname].[tld] in the domain field of the site. If you also want the content to be available via another domain name you have two ways: Add a co-domain to your site or create antohter site and add a redirect to it's Apache config. The latter is better in terms of SEO, but of course you can achieve the same effect with a rewrite rule in an .htaccess file for a single site with co-domain(s).

3. AFAIK that field has no technical function. It's only for internal purposes, bcause it could be that a reseller has his own website which is not hosted on your server. So maybe you'd like to add this information at that point to have all customer/reseller data together.

4. You do not have to have resellers, other than in Confixx for example. In ISPConfig an admin user can also create customers and websites. Therefeore reseller accounts are mostly useful if you really want another person to be able to create customers and websites and/ or for security reasons.
The name you enter is AFAIK only for display. I give customer accounts the name of the person or whoever pays the bill. I name the websites after their domains, making it easier to look up the right site. This maybe not so easy if you hav a site with many co-domains. But from an SEO perspective there should always be only one domain per web being displayed in a client's browser (the main domain, if you like) and so I name the web after this one.

5. You're welcome.

At the beginning I found it a bit confusing dealing with the folders. If you don't care your web gets displayed in a top level folder and not where you might want it to reside. You can move it easily, so that's not a real problem. It just shows us all that there is room for improvement and because issues like this have been addressed in the past (see freature requests sub-forum) I'm confident that ISPConfig 3 will have a lot of improvements.

Right now the current stable version is not perfect, but it does not crash or corrupt data and it does well what it is supposed to do for free. The community is alive and well and development seems to make good progress from what I read. It's definately different from other solutions, but it's pretty powerful and reliable.

 

Thank you, I have managed first client-site-user combination. I think... there are some new problems, but for those I will start new thread. tnx again