My recent switch to Interworx is generating questions!

General Interworx Control Panel Info General Inquries
1

Hello!

I have been itching to post here for awhile now, having made a list of inquiries as I’ve encountered them. Fortunately some of them were originally answered through this forum itself (This thread was great for calming my first impression panic: http://www.interworx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1904) while others were answered with my best friend Google and guesswork.

Life Story (skip-able :P):

I had been using DirectAdmin for about 4 years. It handled everything I needed on my server and I became accustomed to it. Well recently I have moved to a new server host that recommended Interworx. I’ve never used Plesk or Cpanel or any of those, but hadn’t even heard of Interworx before. I decided to give it a try, even though my sure-bet DirectAdmin had been available too. The Interworx interface just looked yummy, how could I not?

First impression was good actually. Things started to work and I was happy. Until I started creating siteworx accounts, and then became a little rattled at how accounts were based on domains instead of users. It really screwed me up at first. I know right? Not even really that big of a deal either. To be totally honest I was very close to contacting my host and having them put DA on there instead. But looking at that delicious interface kept me from doing it. Those live usage charts really held me for some reason.

Anyways I have since warmed up to the weird account formatting (although I was and still kind of am determined to manually alter it in some cases) and have decided to stick with Interworx for the long run, as it certainly seems to be robust. (Although changing my hostname was a bit of a challenge because things stopped working and I think its broken my mailserver)

And so with that, I am at the end of the life story and onto my questions!

Some of these are strictly Interworx questions, and some of them are moreso Linux questions that have more to do with apache than Interworx. My linux competency is pretty good, but I still don’t know everything yet :stuck_out_tongue:

1. Secondary Domains! I cannot for the life of me ever get the secondary domain option to appear in any of the accounts no matter what I try. The documentation doesn’t specify any special conditions or anything. Why is this option inaccessible??

2. /etc/httpd/conf.d/domain.com.conf file editing! Will editing these manually break Interworx functionality at all? Such as changing the users/groups, the documentroot, and locations to the logs and other such paths in these files?

The subdomain logic portion looks really crazy to me. How would I change the path for a subdomain that wasn’t created as its own account but was created in the account of a main domain? (it doesn’t seem to have its own config file unless its created as its own account)

2b. main domain and subdomain relationship! Additionally I have another question about this configuration, in which I would really like to accomplish (and its important that I do). Let’s say I had the main domain engine.com and a subdomain users.engine.com . Interworx puts the users.engine.com’s folder inside the main domains html directory as the directory ‘users’ which for now is good enough; as I do want it to be inside the main domains folder but just under a different structure.

What I want to accomplish is to have the subdomain’s folder be able to access the files of the main domains folder as well, using ./…/ instead of a full url. I believe this should work with php but for .css files this is not possible as it cannot access anything behind the documentroot folder specified in the users.engine.com.conf file. (in this case I created users.engine.com as its own account and then edited the documentroot path to point to where I wanted)

Is there any way to allow that subdomain to access information in folders above its documentroot?

3. Shell Users! I see there are several shells available, the bash and nologin and jk_chroot ones make sense to me, but the others do not. I am assuming they are other standard-ish shell types like korn or whatever is that right? Or are there any notable ones I should be aware of that would be special like jk_chroot?

The jk_chroot one (what does the jk part mean btw?) was also a new one for me, but I looked up as best I could as to what chroot actually is (I noticed the /home/ dir is actually a symbolic link to the /chroot/ dir) . I can’t seem to find out what the limitations of this jk_chroot shell are. Is there any documentation for that somewhere??

Also I noticed the dropdown box at the top for the Default Shell has always been set as /bin/bash but whenever I add new siteworx accounts the default shell is always /sbin/nologin … am I not understanding correctly or is this just a bug?

4. Mailserver! I will actually have to edit in this question later. I have to run off to work now. I tried fixing the mailserver on my own but will need a bit of clarification I think.

I really appreciate any help/insight into this stuff. I actually really love the Interworx panel. There’s a few things I’d like to manually tweak in regards to directory structure (I don’t mind doing it as long as I can figure out how) and theres a few features I’d like to maybe suggest (will do so later) but otherwise I am glad I decided to choose Interworx and stick with it!

Thank you so very much!

-Jeff

2
  1. Secondary Domains! I cannot for the life of me ever get the secondary domain option to appear in any of the accounts no matter what I try. The documentation doesn’t specify any special conditions or anything. Why is this option inaccessible??

Since secondary domains use the same IP as the master domain, the IP the account is on must be “shared” and not “dedicated”. This setting is defined in NodeWorx, on the IP Management page. My guess is that is what needs to change here. Also, secondary domains are only available in unlimited domain licenses.

  1. /etc/httpd/conf.d/domain.com.conf file editing! Will editing these manually break Interworx functionality at all? Such as changing the users/groups, the documentroot, and locations to the logs and other such paths in these files?

Unfortunately changing some things in there will cause problems, yes. For example:
When an account is set to “inactive” its documentroot is changed to point to a “this site is disabled” page. Then when it is re-enabled, it is changed back to /home/user/domain/html - so in that sense, changing that could mess things up. InterWorx also looks for the logs to generate stats etc in those specific locations for each account, so some functionality will break if that is changed. If you’re intent on changing those things, leaving them as is in the .conf’s and symlinking to your alternate location may be a better choice.

The subdomain logic portion looks really crazy to me. How would I change the path for a subdomain that wasn’t created as its own account but was created in the account of a main domain? (it doesn’t seem to have its own config file unless its created as its own account)

The short answer is, you don’t :). The subdomain rewrite logic “forces” users.engine.com to point to the engine.com/users file location. The possibly longer answer is, you could use another rewrite rule in the engine.com/users/.htaccess file, like was suggested in this post: http://www.interworx.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15000&postcount=9

What I want to accomplish is to have the subdomain’s folder be able to access the files of the main domains folder as well, using ./…/ instead of a full url. I believe this should work with php but for .css files this is not possible as it cannot access anything behind the documentroot folder specified in the users.engine.com.conf file. (in this case I created users.engine.com as its own account and then edited the documentroot path to point to where I wanted)

I don’t think I fully understand the situation here - it may be easier to grasp the desired behavior with a more concrete example, which if you prefer we could go over in a support ticket.

2b. main domain and subdomain relationship! Additionally I have another question about this configuration, in which I would really like to accomplish (and its important that I do). Let’s say I had the main domain engine.com and a subdomain users.engine.com . Interworx puts the users.engine.com’s folder inside the main domains html directory as the directory ‘users’ which for now is good enough; as I do want it to be inside the main domains folder but just under a different structure.

What I want to accomplish is to have the subdomain’s folder be able to access the files of the main domains folder as well, using ./…/ instead of a full url. I believe this should work with php but for .css files this is not possible as it cannot access anything behind the documentroot folder specified in the users.engine.com.conf file. (in this case I created users.engine.com as its own account and then edited the documentroot path to point to where I wanted)

I’m honesty not sure if this is possible given the info here. We may be able to work something out in a support ticket with access to see what the exact setup is, and what could be changed to get the desired behavior and still not cause any incompatiblity issues.

  1. Shell Users! I see there are several shells available, the bash and nologin and jk_chroot ones make sense to me, but the others do not. I am assuming they are other standard-ish shell types like korn or whatever is that right? Or are there any notable ones I should be aware of that would be special like jk_chroot?

Those are just other standard available shells - in fact InterWorx just gets the list of shells from the default linux file /etc/shells on the server, and provides the list there

The jk_chroot one (what does the jk part mean btw?) was also a new one for me, but I looked up as best I could as to what chroot actually is (I noticed the /home/ dir is actually a symbolic link to the /chroot/ dir) . I can’t seem to find out what the limitations of this jk_chroot shell are. Is there any documentation for that somewhere??

The “jk_” stands for “jailkit” which is a toolkit for creating chroot shells. That shell creates a mini-chroot for the user is they SSH in, preventing them from accessing files on the server outside of /chroot/

Also I noticed the dropdown box at the top for the Default Shell has always been set as /bin/bash but whenever I add new siteworx accounts the default shell is always /sbin/nologin … am I not understanding correctly or is this just a bug?

Shell accounts are always “disabled” with /sbin/nologin when new accounts are created by default as a security measure. The default shell is what will be used when a user’s shell access is set to “enabled” the first time.

  1. Mailserver! I will actually have to edit in this question later. I have to run off to work now. I tried fixing the mailserver on my own but will need a bit of clarification I think.

We’ll be here when you’re ready.

I really appreciate any help/insight into this stuff. I actually really love the Interworx panel. There’s a few things I’d like to manually tweak in regards to directory structure (I don’t mind doing it as long as I can figure out how) and theres a few features I’d like to maybe suggest (will do so later) but otherwise I am glad I decided to choose Interworx and stick with it!

Thanks Jeff, nice to meet you, and we’re glad you’re giving us a try :slight_smile:

Paul

3

[QUOTE=Jiketsu;15491]Anyways I have since warmed up to the weird account formatting (although I was and still kind of am determined to manually alter it in some cases) and have decided to stick with Interworx for the long run, as it certainly seems to be robust. (Although changing my hostname was a bit of a challenge because things stopped working and I think its broken my mailserver)[/quote]It’s not really that weird, it’s just new to you. I guess similar to driving on the right side of the road as opposed to the left. If you think about it logically it makes a lot of sense.

PHP might work as you said since it’s looking at the directory structure. The CSS is looking at it from a web point of view so I think you will have to reference the domain name fully

So from user.engine.com it would need to change from this

<link href="../styles/engine.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

TO

<link href="http://engine.com/styles/engine.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

You can also open files with PHP using the URL as well.

I’ve been using IW for over 4 years now and am very happy with it. When I have to help people with hosting not provided by me and see cpanel, it just reminds me how lucky I am to be running on IW

4

Ahh, thank you for the prompt replies and warm welcome :slight_smile:

My Interworx license is not unlimited, so that explains the secondary domain issue.

The Shell Users explanation made perfect sense. I am definitely going to look more into jk_chroot as giving shell access to users would be very convenient. I’ve just always worried about the risk attached to that and so maybe now I can be free of worry!

As for my conf.d/apache issue, I will try to explain it better. Sorry I didnt explain it more thoroughly before, I wanted to try to post all my questions before running off to work so I could make some headway when I got home. I really appreciate you offering to have me start a support ticket to work through a solution, but I think I will try to explain it here and then see if a solution can be found before doing that; just cause its not an Interworx issue so to say.

Okay lets say my main domain is mainsite.com which when setup in Iworx gives me /mainsite/mainsite.com/html as the documentroot. Inside that html folder I have my site, and several folders such as images, classes, content, css, files, etc. There is a sort of content management system I coded that gets user info and page content from a database using php scripts in the classes and content folder and it generates the pages.

Then I have a subdomain sub.mainsite.com which I’d like to be located at /mainsite/mainsite.com/html/integrated/sub/ (which I can do using a symbolic link as you noted. I did originally do this to get the directory to where I wanted, but problem still exists)

The problem is that since sub.mainsite.com’s root directory is /mainsite/mainsite.com/html/integrated/sub/ it cannot access anything above it in the directory tree. Example being /mainsite/mainsite.com/html/integrated/sub/file.css having in it a reference to ./…/…/images/header.png (which is actually located at /mainsite/mainsite.com/html/images/header.png) being able to be accessed. It cant access it because it can only access anything in the /mainsite/mainsite.com/html/integrated/sub/ folder and within/below.

I hope that makes sense.

Basically if the user visits http://sub.mainsite.com in their browser, I want to ensure it wont change to http://mainsite.com/integrated/sub/ instead, but still be able to use all the files available in /mainsite/mainsite.com/html/'s folder.

I also want to avoid using urls instead of local paths (such as http://mainsite.com/images/header.png instead of ./…/…/images/header.png)

Your help is extremely appreciated. I am really anxious to get my sites back up and running.

I am thinking maybe I should give another look at the domain pointing feature but I don’t think that will quite work. Maybe I should give it a test run and see what I get. I looked at it earlier but dismissed it because it seemed to be backwards somehow. Maybe I was just thrown off that it wanted the url to be pointed and not a local directory. (you should add that feature btw)

Oh and my mailserver. I think I will go look into that now and see what needs to be said about it. I have a feeling its because of my hostname change. The company I rented the server from gave me some long thing that just had to go :wink: So I am going to retrace my steps on that one see what happens before I make a fuss for nothing :stuck_out_tongue:

Justec:
You are definitely right, the more I am using it the more habitual it is becoming. I am totally a fan of using logic, and I do see the logic indeed. One of my iffy things was originally because i have the same domain name but one is a .com and one is a .net and since they have the same name it put one as domain and one as domai1 and that kinda made me feel weird. But I am over it ^^

Also what you said about using full urls. I am aware of this, but theres a few reasons why I don’t want to do it that way. One of which being that I have automated my site integration a bit using a sort of content management system I made and need to keep everything local access. But I totally appreciate your response nonetheless (no really)

And yeah I’ve heard lots of bad stuff about Cpanel, even though I wanted to give it a try since it seemed so popular. I am really really glad I have discovered Interworx instead because it really is solid.

Many many thanks!

[B]Update:

[/B]I have resolved my mailserver problems. It seems I was affected by the port 25 issue where my ISP at home was blocking all traffic on that port. And here I thought it was a hostname issue :slight_smile:

So that’s pretty much it. I guess. Just my complicated inquiry regarding apache domain arrangement (scared everyone away it seems :P) is all thats left.

Oh actually I do have one more question, I have several IPs on the server, which I’ve divided up to different domains/services. But some of the software being run doesn’t allow me to specify which IP is being used within its own configuration. Even though all the IPs on the box seem to work for connecting the software, the one that is being displayed publicly on the global lobby service shows the main server IP which I would like to avoid. Is there any way to have certain users in the home directory only use certain ips?

That’s all I got :slight_smile: Thanks a lot!