ISPConfig & AjaXplorer

[serverstage]

I have been working on the AjaXplorer bridge and have made a lot of progress, however it is not finished yet. I'll post what I have here and also on the AjaXplorer forum and hope that someone with a similar setup finds it useful and might even contribute to the solution. Thanks to apoana on howtoforge for laying the groundwork.

My ISPConfig setup is multi server. AjaXplorer is installed on, and it's database tables must be created in the master ISPConfig database. There are no modifications required on the slave servers.

You will login to AjaXplorer with your ISPConfig username/password.
The process is to find the groups in sys_user where this user has access. For each group that has an ssh user defined, a Repository is created. This happens automatically at each login, but we skip the Repositories which are already created (but first checking for changes to the hostname, domainname, username and pass).

In order to make the connection from the master server to the slave, AjaXplorer needs to know the password, so changes have been made in ISPConfig to save the users' shell pass in cleartext. Obviously a security issue - maybe someone can figure out a better way? Using the SSH account gives us the possibility to connect via the secure and fast SFTP plugin. I did have other problems with this though, see below...

TODO:
1. delete repositories which don't exist (as defined in ISPConfig)
2. find a better way to authenticate the repositories, so that we don't save passwords in cleartext
3. Passthrough authentication from ISPConfig
4. **Fix the issues with SFTP or choose a different data access mechanism
- image thumbnails not working
- downloads slow to initialize
- zip folders not working
- apparent folder access error when using jailkit on the slave


Regards, Brandon