On 30 Oct 2002, little bark, BIG BYTE!! (but surely that's not his/her 
name) wrote:

> One thing that has always bothered me slightly about SME is it's lack of
> multiple domain management for users (e-mail specifically).

And that's the nub of the issue. SME Server is not a virtual domain mail 
server - it's a multi-protocol file access server, as well as 
POP/IMAP/SMTP/LDAP server. Username conventions, authentication 
mechanisms and access restrictions have to be consistent across all of 
these protocols if you want the server to be something like what it is 
today.

If you just want a virtual domain mail server, you'll need to strip SME 
server down to bare bones and add one of the virtual domain mail packages 
which already exist - although you'll probably come back to VMailMgr 
http://www.vmailmgr.org/.

Otherwise you'll need to stick with one population of users who login 
using their usernames and system passwords, and work out a way to route
all incoming mail to whichever user you wish to receive them: e.g.
bob@domain1 to fred, bob@domain2 to joe, *@domain3 to jenny.

IMO the starting point for improving virtual domain handling is firstly to 
separate the concept of a web site from handling of the email of a  
domain. The server can then handle the email for any number of domains, 
and also host any number of websites, but the two lists are distinct (and 
need to be set up differently in external DNS).

Once that is done, you can consider the email routing issues mentioned 
above.

The next thing to be done is to have more flexible definition of how each
virtual website is handled. Some virtual domains could be patched through
to internal servers using ProxyPass. For others, it would be good to have 
an i-bay defined as the root for that server, with any number of other 
i-bays attached into the tree wherever we want to put them. For example:

fred.virtual.domain server could have i-bay fred/html as the root of its 
web server, but with i-bay green/html accessible as 
http://fred.virtual.domain/info/green. For good measure, allow ProxyPass 
of subpaths as well - e.g. pass http://fred.virtual.domain/sales/shop 
through to an internal server.

The hard bit of this isn't configuring the servers, it's working out the 
database format to describe the mapping of data sources to URLs withing a 
virtual domain and designing the user interface for managing that 
database.

To simplify the above, we'd want to treat all domains the same, so we'd
get rid of "primary", and we'd set up the local domain as a pre-defined
mail and web virtual domain.

--
Charlie Brady                         [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lead Product Developer
Network Server Solutions Group        http://www.e-smith.com/
Mitel Networks Corporation            http://www.mitel.com/
Phone: +1 (613) 592 5660 or 592 2122  Fax: +1 (613) 592 1175





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