Questions before purchase

General Interworx Control Panel Info General Inquries
1

Hi.

Tried interworx a while back in its early stages, but ultimately decided with HC8 since they supported windows/linux cluster.

However, at this point we are looking for an alternative. Don’t get me wrong, HC8 staff have been awesome and the HC is great. But it seems that they are more tailored to Windows implementations, although they do support linux but minimal.

Now I am back and looking to check out interworx.

Can you tell me more about the feature set. There are some that I’m particularly gonna need so please let me know if they’re supported.

  1. webmail that can compare to the norm nowadays. rich interface like smartermail or mailenable interface. or can i use a windows based mailserver?
  2. push email, or imap idle support. activesync and syncml better.
  3. NAT support. This is where HC8 excels as it can automatically change dns settings to the public IPs, even if the servers themselves are private ips.
  4. central firewall. will clustering still work if they’re behind private IPs?
  5. how does clustering work? are the services (web/mail/dns/mysql) located on different machines, such that if one server fails or eample apache overloads, it will not affect mail.
  6. billing support, does it come with one or i need to use a 3rd party?
  7. signup pages? or this is part of the 3rd party billing software?
  8. template/interface skinning
  9. windows support down the road?

I think I missed some, but i’ve been up 24 hours trying to get some issues resolved with our current control panel…

2

OK, let’s see here… :slight_smile:

1 - We provide SquirrelMail, Horde, and Roundcube. Of the three, Roundcube is the only one I’d describe as “rich” or “smart” :wink:

2 - The IMAP does IDLE, I think. I’ll ask Paul and confirm later.

3 - Yup, no problem. Just set up the private IPs first, then an “External IP” shows up for configuration in the IP Management page.

4 - Yup. The only real restriction is that they have to be on the same subnet.

5 - The current clustering solution uses ldirectord for load balancing/failover services to nodes. You can set it up to have different services on different machines if you want. The bottleneck/single point of failure is the Cluster Manager, since it’s set up as a centralized storage and MySQL server.

6 - There’s no built-in billing system. InterWorx is supported by NocWorx, WHMCS, HostBill, ModernBill, Ubersmith, Plesk Billing, ClientExec, and maybe some others that haven’t told us :slight_smile:

7 - Nope, this would be something for the billing system.

8 - Yup. All four themes that ship with InterWorx are based on one, and it’s just CSS and images that make the differences.

9 - I doubt it. While I’m impressed with the ambition of the systems that do both, the two are so drastically different that it would pretty much be a separate product for InterWorx.

Let us know if you think of what you missed. But, get some sleep first!

3

Thanks for the quick reply.

My main issues right now with our current system are bugs. one thing gets fixed then another shows up.

The NAT, in number 3. Can that support multiple external and multiple internal IPs?

In number 5 - The mysql server has to reside in the cluster manager, and cannot be part of the failover/cluster itself, to be redundant as well?

Also can you tell me more about the failover/cluster system in interworx. Are websites replicated across multiple servers, or they just access the same SAN? We have SAN in place, so if it’s the latter then that would be great. However, there is still a point of failure in the SAN. If that fails then the whole cluster fails right? Or interworx also has a workaround for such scenario?

Oh one more thing. Since billing and signup are handled by 3rd aprty such as whmcs, when customers log in, do they have a separate login then for whmcs and interworx? or they just log into whmcs, or interworx? I’m asking because if we can use our whmcs billing, then I can integrate our dedicated server customers, colo, and other customers with our shared hosting customers. This way, only one billing and client portal for all of them. Or that will not work??

Thanks so much for addressing my concerns.

4

Well, I won’t sit here and tell you there are no bugs in InterWorx. I can tell you that we have a very nimble setup for responding - we issue hotfix builds as we find issues. We also have an automated build suite with over 4500 unit tests, so regressions are extremely rare.

Each private IP has an External IP. Does that answer your question? We don’t support multiple mappings or anything like that.

The MySQL is set up this way by default. You can actually make InterWorx use external MySQL servers - and they don’t even need to be running InterWorx. You just set up a special account for InterWorx on the external server, and tell InterWorx. You can set up multiple MySQL servers and assign SiteWorx accounts and Resellers to the servers as you see fit.

The storage for all sites is centralized on the Cluster Manager. The nodes use NFS to mount the CM to access storage. If you’ve mounted the SAN in the home directory of the CM, then it should just work. Some features can be more complicated with a SAN - some of them don’t support quotas, which are needed to limit account storage.

You would still have the SAN as a single point of failure, and the Cluster Manager itself. The CM does all the load balancing, so if it goes, so does the cluster.

We don’t currently have a product on the market that provides a workaround. :wink:

5

Thanks!! I’ll see how we can migrate our customers with least downtime.

Any migration assistance or migration modules in interworx to transfer from HC8?

6

Nope, sorry.

7

ahh ok… i don’t think it will be too much of an issue…

hey is nocworx from you guys as well? i cannot find much info about it… is it a billing system like whmcs?

and does interworx support litespeed?

8

NOCWorx is a separate project run buy a separate development team, you can find their website at http://nocworx.com/. NOCWorx is basically a tool for managing your entire hosting service. If you e-mail them they can give you all the information you need.

Litespeed is presently unsupported (officially), but that will probably change in the near future hint hint.

9

thanks! I think i’m going to get rid of my windows side and switch to interworx… HC8 jsut too freaking unstable. instead of having to run my company i’m ending up baby siity the system and it’s countless bugs… imaginge, now i cannot even confirm a signup and throws an error… in fact all there errors are just abunch of numbers with no exact detail what the error is about… i think i’ve had it…

so interworx here i come…

but first…were you able to confirm imap idle??? that is a must for my needs.

edit:

also, can I just install interworx in my existing linux server where the websites are? Or do i need to provision a new hardware and do migration? That will take longer, and I just need to get rid of HC8. And I would need to be able to set the email on a separate box. can that be done?

10

Hi.

I have finally installed interworx and let me tell you guys that i’m very impressed. it is miles ahed of what we were using before (cpanel then hsphere then hostingcontroller). However, I have a couple questions.

  1. Where can I see detailed help files, or instructions for the settings? I clicked help and it pointed to a 404 page. I want t know some of the features, such as api, and other stuff…

  2. Can I start using this as a one server setup for now, then switch to a cluster setup by adding additional boxes? The reason is it will take time for us to migrate totally, so until we can provision additional servers we will be running on one server setup for now.

  3. When we switch to clustered setup, can we isolate some resellers or interworx account to specific servers? The reason behind it is for our packages, our cheapest package will reside in a server with more accounts, while our corporate package will be sort of semi dedicated where only a few accounts will share a server. Can this be accomplished?

  4. I know I mentioned litespeed to replace apache in the forum a couple weeks back. However, I read in litespeed’s site that it can install and run using apache’s existing httpd.conf file. Will this work with interworx or will it break the installation? I fell that I will need to start using litespeed since most of our clients are ecommerce sites that use a lot of resources (on our current setup at least).

  5. How do I integrate whmcs? I can’t find any docs. :slight_smile: Or if can someone from nodeworx shoot me an email? I sent a request last week but have not heard back so far.

  6. When we install whmcs and integrate it to iworx, where will the clients be logging in? to the whmcs panel or still through iworx? With our current setup it has it’s own crappy billing system and cannot fully integrate whmcs so we could not tie the two together.

  7. I couldn’t find the settings to put in the domain registrar. can you point me to the correct location? Same for SSL integration. And which 3rd parties work with iworx? I assume enom. what about for ssl, enom as well?

  8. Any update with regards to my question on IMAP IDLE? Does Iworx support this?

  9. In the IP Settings, there is a shared/dedicated dropdown and allow reseller option. What happens if I select dedicated/or shared then disable reseller access, who will be able to use the IP then? Or that will totally disable the IP from being used by anyone? And what if I have multiple shared IPs? Will the account creation be randomized or rotated between available shared IPs?

Thanks, and my apologies for the lengthy post and if I ask too many questions :slight_smile:

11

1 - http://www.interworx.com/support/docs
http://www.interworx.com/support/docs/developer/api

2 - Yes

3 - Not within a single cluster. There are very significant differences between what Hsphere was doing with clusters and…well, everyone else. This is one of those differences.

4 - Officially sanctioned Litespeed support is coming soon. Installing it yourself with the Apache conf setup should work, but it will not work with bandwidth limitations - Litespeed uses different log files, so it’s not fully compatible at the moment.

5 - I’ll bug the NocWorx guys, see if I can get someone in touch. I think that’s what you meant :wink:

6 - I don’t know. I’ll find out.

7 - I think you’re talking about two features that don’t exist. You mean domain integration, where people can purchase domains from within InterWorx directly, same with SSL? You may be able to do that with WHMCS.

8 - InterWorx uses courier-imap. Courier supports IDLE, though it looks like it’s not configured by default. As with #6 - I’ll find out. Today. Sorry about the delay on that.

9 - In that case, the “master” account (you) will be able to use it. Having it not accessible to resellers means that only accounts directly associated with the master NodeWorx account can use them.

For your other question - we strongly recommend using a fresh install, with no sites. Takes longer, but it’s absolutely more reliable.

Tim

12

Thanks! Yep I did a fresh install and switched. This things rocks! I kinda figured out #6. So just the IMAP IDLE thing is missing. Please let me know when get the info.

thanks

:slight_smile:

13

OK, finally figured out how to confirm #8. Looks like IDLE is configured and enabled by default.

14

so it’s IMAP IDLE? that’s cool!!! We can now get rid of our windows-based mailservers lol…

by the way, regarding number 3, is there a workaround? I do not want to house our ecommerce clients with our lower end packages. as they pay a lot more for the environment and would not want to be shared with everyone else…

15

The “workaround”, if it’s worth calling it that, is to just have a separate InterWorx system, perhaps not even a cluster, to run the “lesser” packages.

Something like NocWorx or WHMCS can probably make the management of that much easier.