User question

Yet another person with a question about creating users. :)

I have very little experience with web hosting, mostly just doing the basics, one click installs, etc. I have used FTP, but never created multiple users.

My question is as follows. I would like to give some of the people who access my website frequently some "space" to make their own webpages. Not a lot of space, but just something so they can do some work on their own. Ideally, I would like them to be able to modify and upload pages themselves, but I would still like to be able to have access as a supervisor in case I need to change, remove, or add anything myself. I don't want them to have to keep sending me files for me to put in their accounts or anything.

Looking at the whole user setup, it appears if I create a fully hosted subdomain for each of them, they can have access to it, but I no longer can (unless I log in through their username). Of course, with the dreamhost panel, I can see their username and password, so that is not a huge issue. It would be nice to have all the user accounts visible at once, however, rather than logging in to each one individually.

Is it possible to do something like this with redirected subdomains? I don't want to give them unlimited access to the main domain (or any of my stuff). How would I do about setting this up?

Thanks for the help!

Chris

Christopher John Vitek

In reply to:

---

Is it possible to do something like this with redirected subdomains? I don't want to give them unlimited access to the main domain (or any of my stuff). How would I do about setting this up?

---

You would need a CGI application that allows users to upload files. The CGI application would manage access controls and file management. What you want is not possible using FTP and machine (ftp/shell) user accounts.

As far as viewing all accounts at once, if you login as SFTP (SSH2) you can visit the home directories of users on your cluster given the permissions are open.


Atropos | openvein.org

Thanks for the response.

I have no idea about CGI script, so I guess that is out.

I suppose I can set up an anonymous ftp "upload" page or something, with subdirectories for each user. I could then have each user upload into their subdirectory, with me transfering the files to their domain (or subdomain). More effort than I was hoping for, but if that's what I have to do, oh well. :)

Thanks again!

Chris

Christopher John Vitek

if you want to use something like the 'anonymous' FTP, it would lkely be better to set up a user account with only FTP access, and perhaps (similarly to below) have "directories" (which would really be symbolic links) to their -actual- directory on the webserver. In this way you would kind of almost get what you want. A way for your users to log in, and access their directory while not being albe to access YOUR stuff and also giving YOU access to the files since it would be a common login. You just have to make sure that people can trust each other with esentially full access to your other user's stuff.

So as an example, I have 3 users: fred ted and bob! Each one has their own subdomain: ted.mysite.com bob.mysite.com and fred.mysite.com each one of those directories would live in my main site's directories.

now, if I was clever enough, I could create a user with FTP access (say, an account called happyhosters) find out what group this user is in (should be something similar to other users I think???) and change the group on the individual directories for users to be that of the FTP user andgive the group read/write permissions so they can upload....

I don't think this is -exaxctly- what you want, nor can I gurantee you it will even -work- but it is worth a look!

Edited by aura.bleu on 09/18/06 08:50 AM (server time).