Question about directory structure

General Interworx Control Panel Info General Inquries
1

This isn’t anything serious. I’m just kind of wondering what the purpose of the structures in the /home directory.

If I create an account for the owner of domain.tld, the directory structure will be /home/domaintl/domain.tld/html. Why did you guys choose to design it that way and not /home/domain.tld/html?

It seems like the shorter name (domaintl) is just generated from the full domain, so it doesn’t really gain you anything. It seems like it just makes the odds more likely that you will have a collision between similar domain names (e.g. domainnumber1.com and domainnumber2.com).

Also, why not use the nicknames entered in Nodeworx for the domains instead? That seems like it would make sense because the same user would have all his or her domains in a single subdirectory.

I’m probably missing something obvious due to my being *nix-impaired. :slight_smile:

2

This isn’t anything serious. I’m just kind of wondering what the purpose of the structures in the /home directory.

If I create an account for the owner of domain.tld, the directory structure will be /home/domaintl/domain.tld/html. Why did you guys choose to design it that way and not /home/domain.tld/html?

It seems like the shorter name (domaintl) is just generated from the full domain, so it doesn’t really gain you anything. It seems like it just makes the odds more likely that you will have a collision between similar domain names (e.g. domainnumber1.com and domainnumber2.com).

Good question lineman :), and there is a logical answer.

The directory structures were chosen as they are, with /home/domaint/domain.tld because we plan to add mutli-domain support for each siteworx account in the very near future. At this point you could have /home/domaint/seconddomain.com, along with /home/domaint/domain.tld (i.e. domain.tld and seconddomain.com are both within the domaint directory).

This allows for a single site owner to login at the root (i.e. /home/domaint) and see all of their domains at once, and also allows them greater control of who gets access to what, and even allow users of domain.tld to access seconddomain.com via ftp. This is the main reason for the structure and I’ll address the naming schemes below.

Also, why not use the nicknames entered in Nodeworx for the domains instead? That seems like it would make sense because the same user would have all his or her domains in a single subdirectory.

I’m probably missing something obvious due to my being *nix-impaired.

There’s a few reasons. Firstly, we can guarantee unique names. If domainone.com and domainooh.com are both on the same box, one of the two will just have a numeral as the 8th character. This is better IMHO than relying on the user to pick unix names when they may just be confused about why a nickname is “taken” (i.e. 2 people enter “jeff” and the 2nd jeff isn’t allowed since the ‘jeff’ unix user already exists). Secondly, an 8 char unix username is just pretty to look at. the ‘ls’ command truncates unix usernames at 8 characters so if someone entered “loooooooongusername” and another entered “looooooooooooooooooooongusername” they’d both show up as:


drwxr-sr-x    4 loooooooo loooooooo     4096 Aug 29 00:22 ..

in ls output, which could be confusing.

The main reason for auto-choosing is that InterWorx-CP abstracts out the unix user every chance it gets. Many users have no idea what this mysterious unix user is, how it works etc.

I hope I’ve made our case, we did put a lot of thought into it :).

Chris

3

Yeah, that makes sense. Especially for the multi-domain support for Siteworx. Now that I have my own box, it’s not a big deal, but that was something I was hoping for in the past. :slight_smile:

I see what you mean about the users picking names. People are fussy about stuff like that so taking the issue away pretty much defuses it entirely. :wink:

4

I tend to agree and like the fact that when I’m doing something as the webmastre I don’t have to remember the user name. It’s the first 8 characters of the domain name. That’s much easier to remember.

5

For those who are concerned about ssh access and what username we’ll use at that point, what we’ll probably do is setup multiple user accounts with the same uid/gid as the “uniqname” as we call it (i.e. the first 8 chars of the domain).

That way I can have:

/home/nexcessn/ for the nexcess.net site and the ‘clwells’ user will have the same uid/gid as nexcessn so they will, in essence, be the same user. Again, we’re still toying, but we are thinking ahead on these things :).

Chris

6

So you’re deffinitely going to allow site-worx users shell access? I hope this is something that I can turn OFF in the SiteWorx account setup. With a file manager like SiteWorx has I personaly see NO reason to give it out to the SiteWorx user. If I want someone to have access I will do the command that you or paul posted to the forums a while back to enable it or else create a system user for that person. Giving every account that kind of access is an unacceptable security risk to me.

Tim

7

again, this is planning, not doing (yet).

And if/when we put in SSH anything the server owner will have full control, believe me. We don’t hand out SSH accounts like candy on our own boxes for good reason, and we’re not goign to start.

Chris

8

Glad to hear it :slight_smile: