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[ANNOUNCE] VishwaKarma -- Web Hosting Control Panel
Hi,
Those of you who're in the mass web hosting business now have a new
toy to play around with: VishwaKarma, a full-featured web-hosting
control panel. Version 1.0 is ready, tested on RedHat 6.2 and
currently being tweaked to work on Debian (I should be getting the
diffs soon). It has been running on 2 production servers in Delhi for
over a month without any serious problems.
VishwaKarma (VK) is fully GPL'ed, so there's no reason to buy that
Cobalt now -- any old Pentium and VK will give you that functionality.
Use it, abuse it, make money out of it, give it your your husband/wife
on his/her birthday -- have a ball. VK is written completely in Perl
and comes with 20 whole bytes of documentation -- OTOH, there's about
a couple of megabytes of comments in the source, so feel free to
browse.
VishwaKarma is downloadable from:
http://www.kandalaya.org/
There is also a mirror in Denmark (VK will probably hit the record
books as being the first software to have a mirror before the software
itself came into existence :-) , though if you're in India the
Kandalaya link is likely to be faster:
http://sfarc.net/vk/
Want to know more? Attend my talk on VK at Bangalore IT.COM on the
3rd (IIRC)... or drop me a line.
If you manage to do something useful with VK I'd like to hear about
it. On the other hand, if VK happens to jump up as you enter your
house after a long and tiring day at office and bites the top of your
head off, I'd like to hear about that too.
README attached under.
Regards,
-- Raju
$Id: README,v 1.2 2000/10/22 04:11:11 raju Exp $
VishwaKarma
A control panel for virtual hosting providers
Virtual hosting is the process of serving multiple domains from a
single computer for http, ftp and mail services. As the number of IP
addresses available lessens, hosting providers are looking at doing
``soft'' virtual hosting, i.e. configuring multiple virtual hosts on a
single IP address. This process creates many issues for the hosting
provider.
VishwaKarma, the Control Panel is a means of setting up and managing
multiple name-based (i.e. soft) virtual hosts on a single server
through a web interface. Multiple levels of authorisation are built
in. Some of the functionality available at each level is:
System Manager
--------------
- Create/Delete resellers
- Assign disk quotas to resellers
Reseller
--------
- Create/Modify/Delete domains
- Assign disk quotas to individual domains from her own quota
- Define properties of domains (e.g. frontpage/mysql support, web
stats, etc)
Domain Owner
------------
- Unix cmdline and restricted ftp access to update web pages
- Manage e-mail accounts
E-mail account holder
---------------------
- Change e-mail password
- Determine disposition of e-mail (local delivery, forward and/or
auto-reply)
FEATURES
--------
Some of the features of VishwaKarma include:
- Cascading authority
Each level of authority has access to all the functionality
available at all levels below. E.g. Reseller can do everything that
Domain Owner can do, while Domain Owner can do everything that E-mail
account holder can do.
- LDAP-based
No need to create system accounts for e-mail users. Uses a hacked
gnu-pop3d to auth POP3 users using LDAP and access mail files from
home directories.
- Works with standard Linux packages
Uses standard Linux OpenLDAP, named, Apache HTTPD, sendmail, etc.
- Uses stylesheets
Styles easily customisable through the use of a single CSS.
- Automatic updates
SUID Perl program makes all necessary changes to system files, user
does not need to login to shell at any time. Security NOT tested
yet, needs to be tightened.
- Well-commented code
I'm a hacker, so all my documentation is in the form of comments :-)
- Domain parking
Permits parking of one domain on another (e.g. ganwaar.org is the
same as ganwaar.com and serves the same content).
- Reseller/Owner Branding
Permits PNG images and/or HTML branding on pages.
TODO
----
Please see the file TODO in this distribution.
INSTALLATION
------------
Please see the file INSTALL in this distribution.
AUTHOR
------
Raju Mathur <raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
COPYRIGHT
---------
Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, Raju Mathur <raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
LICENSE
-------
Please see the file COPYING which is part of this distribution.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the file
COPYING (included with this distribution) or the GNU General Public
License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
CREDITS
-------
Thanks go to the following:
- Abhijat Paliwal of PALCOM (http://www.palcomonlinenet.net/) for moral
support and permitting use of his systems for testing. Special thanks
to PALCOM for reasons too numerous to list here.
- Jai Bansal of Biz Net India (http://www.jaiz.com/) for more moral
support and allowing Betas on his running server.
- Rajnish Malhotra of Net Soft (http://www.netsoftindia.com/) for Beta
testing and Beta testing permissions.
- G P Singh of Delhinet (http://www.delhinet.com/) for initiating this
idea in the first place. Too bad it didn't work out, but I (and all
users of this software) still owe you.
- Gaurav Sabharwal. He knows why. Send me a mail if you see this,
Gaurav, so I know where you are!
- Aparna Jha, currently serving her sentence as my spouse, for moral
support, encouragement and all the frustrating times she tried to talk
to me when I was working on the package and getting monosyllabic
replies in return.
- Shiv Jha Mathur and Aishwarya Jha Mathur, my children, for moral
support and picking out typos. Without them this project would have
been completed in a quarter of the time and been one-tenth of the fun
it was :-)