ispconfig users and cgi-bin

[isn]

Real newbie. I've decided to take my web server and ispconfig it.

I'm working on a centos 5.4 virutal machine.

Install has gone well and all services are up.

I added users, and don't see those users on the system. Do I need users in /etc/passwd, is there a script to extract and add them, how does that all work. Confused.

Set up a website, the cgi-bin location is not normal. (I was being stupid. web users are fine). Looking into a way to provide shell access to users that want it.
My pre-ISPCONFIG configuration had the cgi-bin the same level on the directory tree as htdocs.

Sould I just softlink to the location for each website?

What are the most common settings to use when setting up a standard website permitting some perl scripts?

If you want to see configuration that will have to wait a few hours till I get to the vm machine.

SEP

[till]

You should not do anything on the shell. Take a look at the monitor to see why ispconfig is not able to write the system configuration.

[isn]

Very cool.

I will check it. It is therefore my understand that if shell users need to be created ispconfig should do that.

You should not do anything on the shell. Take a look at the monitor to see why ispconfig is not able to write the system configuration.

[isn]

Okay.

Found my users.

They are like this:

defaultusername
defaultuser2

Why is that? Did I make a mistake?

Oh, there is the clientname entry on the user entry screen. I left everything default to localhost so it would work in a vitual machine.

I need a way to make a user come out as username, not somethingusername

SEP

[isn]

Figured out the user stuff mostly.

My web site users default to web1,web2 etc.

Is there a reason for that or a way to manpulate that and get more creative names?

I see by default these web users have no shell, they can't log in on the command line.

What if my web users want to do some command line stuff. I can create command line users, but I'm not sure its advisable to drop them in the same directory as the webuser.

Now if I change the user name in /etc/passwd, I bet I break something because there is also a user stored in mysql database.

There must be a cookbook here. I feel like I'm learning from scratch.

SEP

[till]

Is there a reason for that or a way to manpulate that and get more creative names?

These names are just for internal technical use. As nobody is ever using them to connect to the server, the names do not matter.

I see by default these web users have no shell, they can't log in on the command line.

Thats intended and they shall not be able to login!

What if my web users want to do some command line stuff. I can create
command line users, but I'm not sure its advisable to drop them in the same directory as the webuser.

Then create a shell user in ispconfig. ISPConfig is creating an alias user with the name you had choosen which runs under the ID of the website shell user. Thats why the username of the website user does not matter at all.

Now if I change the user name in /etc/passwd, I bet I break something because there is also a user stored in mysql database.

Yes. Never change a shell user created by ispconfig manually in any way!

[isn]

Is this true? When a user wants to ssh/ftp in to put content on the server, is this not the user they use?

SEP
These names are just for internal technical use. As nobody is ever using them to connect to the server, the names do not matter.

[till]

The use the userid of this user, but not the username. ISPConfig configures the linux users so that you can have more then one ssh user per website but all share the same userid to be able to edit the files of the website.