ispman (ISP Manager) manage dns, apachevhosts, users, cyrus mailboxes with LDAP

Atif Ghaffar aghaffar at developer.ch
Thu Aug 3 00:29:29 UTC 2000


Hi.

I had previously mentioned on these lists about a program that I have
had been working on, that manages mails, mailboxes, users, dns etc via
LDAP.

The program named ISPMan was written for the company I work for called
4unet.net.

At 4unet, we had the challange of managing almost a hundred domains,
each of their virtual website, some with one some with more, 
their mails, users etc.
Another challange was to manage scalibility and load balancing of these
services.

I dont want any unix gurus in the team to be disturbed for tasks like
adding/modifying users, domains, virtual hosts for the web etc, they
have better things to do. 
so I wrote ISPMan. http://www.ispman.org

Since then life is good. The help-desk guys who know pretty much nothing
other than Windowns are able to manage this large network.

ISPMan uses an LDAP database as the source for all information (user
account info, dns data, http data etc) There was no need to create any
system user.

This giant was achieved using Postfix+Cyrus+OpenLDAP+apache(all open
source softwares. No Microsoft products were harmed in the creating of
ISPMan)

More info about ispman. (Warming: dry stuff ahead)
--------------------------------------------------
LDAP is an excellent protocol for information management and
distribution. Its the base of any successful scalable project.

the ldap tree looks something like this
o=company, name
|
|_domain=ispman.org
  |
  |_ou=dnsdata 
  |                                 
  |_ou=httpdata
  |
  |_ou=users

etc. you can look at a better representation at
http://www.ispman.org/ldapdata.html


We are using 4 front end servers , so we replicate the LDAP data to all
of them then use some scripts to generate named zone files (so all
servers act as primary)
there are other scripts that get information from the ou=httpdata branch
and create apache virtualhosts, check for the directories if they exists
etc.

There is a web based front end that I was actively working on. 
I think I was also coding a command line front end but I dont know what
the status of that tool is.

Scalability:
------------
	Mailboxes need not be on the same server. 
	As need arises, you can add more machines to your maildrop service, 
	install Cyrus, and simply choose which mailbox server to create the
user's mailbox on when creating a users.
	
	For example, it dont make a lot of sence to create mailbox of a user
from Singapore branch on the Zurich server etc.

	Also for various purposes, an administrator might choose to move a
user's mailbox from one node to another.


High Availibility:
------------------
	LDAP can be replicated.
	So server1 going down will not affect server2. It sure will affect
users whose mailbox was on server1, but if that sort 
	of HA is required than there are ways to arrange them. (2 node clusters
with Shared SCSI storage) or the ultimate GFS.


Mangeability:
-------------
	All information is in LDAP. 
	It can be managed from a central point.
(DNS/users/mailboxes/virtualservers) etc
	I will work on another branch which will be targeted towards
Enterprises to replace Exchange+W2k Crap, this
	version is strictly for ISPs.
	You can see screenshots at http://www.ispman.org/screenshots.php3


So give it a try.

The project is hosted at sourceforge, so if any of you want to help,
please register as a developer.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ispman/

Currently I would like someone to help me write a proxy for POP/IMAP
that talks to the LDAP server to find which server the mailbox is on and
redirects the connection to that server.
see the following link for more info
http://sourceforge.net/people/viewjob.php?group_id=8390&job_id=667




thnx


-- 
Atif Ghaffar

Internet Development Manager
4unet AG/SA [http://www.4unet.net]
Email : atif.ghaffar at 4unet.net
Phone : +41 78 787 5145
Fax   : +41 24 441 0903

-- Binary/unsupported file stripped by Listar --
-- Type: text/x-vcard
-- File: aghaffar.vcf
-- Desc: Card for Atif Ghaffar




More information about the bind-users mailing list