Here is some background on what Plesk is and my experiences in getting Midgard 1.4.4 up and going with it.
Plesk Server Administrator (PSA) http://www.plesk.com is a web-based administrator for Linux servers. It is designed to give web/email hosting companies an easy-to-use interface for managing their customers. Web, Email, DNS and other things are all easily controllable. Customers can login and manage many things themselves (ie. Let them create their own email accounts, etc...) PSA is compatible with a number of Linux distributions but they seem to favor RedHat. I installed RedHat 7.3 (they're specifically not compatible with 8.0 [the newer PERL I think is why]) on a server and updated all packages released by RedHat for various security issues and bugs first. I then installed PSA 5.0.5 RPM edition. The RPM edition only adds the management interface and utilizies the MySQL, Apache and other things already installed by RedHat. The Standard edition installs it's own copies of these utilities. PSA modifies httpd.conf slightly and adds an Include directive at the very end to bring in the httpd.include file. This file is recreated from a database every time you add a client or make a change via the PSA interface. Manual changes to it are lost but httpd.conf can be modified without losing anything. The httpd.include file contains the <VirtualHost ...> entries for the customers sites and things like PHP, CGI, mod_perl, Frontpage Extensions and other things can be activated or deactivated in the PSA interface. Appropriate entries for these features are placed in the httpd.include as necessary. Here is where I had a problem since entries such as "MidgardEngine On" go inside the VirtualHost section for a site. Something which isn't documented in their manual and I discovered from their forums is a per-virtual-host configuration file. The file /home/httpd/vhosts/{domainname}/conf/vhost.conf can be created with additional customized apache directives included in it. I took portions of the midgard-data.conf file and placed them in this file. The NameVirtualHost and <VirtualHost ...> entries are already there from PSA so I removed those. In case a PSA administrator is trying to follow this and hasn't read the forum postings on the use of vhost.conf, the command /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/my_apci_rst must be ran after creating the vhost.conf file so that PSA knows the file exists and will include it into the Apache configuration. In summary PSA is a great administration utility to create a new Apache virtual host for a customer, setup email for them, DNS, MySQL databases and users, etc... These things can all be done by hand (fairly easily for some of you) but this way the customer can do a lot of their own administration work. Salespeople can setup a new email address for a customer for instance without involving a "technical" person. It's point-and-click server admin. Midgard I'm just learning and liking what I see so far. I've only dabbled with PHP for a few months and this is my first foray into the world of "content management". It's a whole new, if not interesting, world. PS. I followed the Midgard installation instructions available on the Aegir www.aegir-cms.org site. Hooray for good open source install docs for a change! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
