[freeside-users] Web Hosting

[Ivan Kohler]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 01:17:23PM -0400, Richard Siddall wrote:
> Jim Cobb wrote:
> > I would like to move my sites over to a Debian server running Apache
> > and other services.  What control panels are people using to allow
> > clients to manage their own domains?  I would like them to be able to
> > add/remove email accounts, reset passwords, create sql db's if their
> > account includes access to them.  SQL is not a big need, but email
> > control and passwords are.
> > 
> 
> We're currently moving the last of our hosting customers off of our RaQs
> and onto SWSoft Plesk.
> 
> We haven't finished converting the exports to work with Plesk; we're
> currently using a custom Perl script to create sites.

Are you going to use FS::part_export::acct_plesk and/or 
FS::part_export::www_plesk?  Take a look if not - I'd certainly like to 
avoid having multiple re-implemented Plesk exports.

> The exports will be a stop-gap anyway.  We have grandiose plans for
> enhancing the hosting support in Freeside to meet our needs.

Please, consider sharing those plans and getting involved in the 
development with us rather than developing them privately!  I'd 
certainly like to get your enhancements into the base release.  On your 
side, it will make it easier for you to upgrade to new releases if you 
minimize the amount of custom code by merging stuff up to us.  I believe 
we set you up with CVS access some time ago.  I'm dissapointed we 
haven't gotten any contributions yet.  :)

> I believe good support for control panels will require running an agent 
> on the hosting machines that talks to Freeside, so you can keep 
> Freeside's database in sync with what the customers are doing through 
> the control panel.

In the case where you want both Freeside and Plesk to have a view of 
individual mailboxes/accounts, yes.  The self-service API is intended to 
be used for this purpose.  The API offers the ability to 
provision/unprovision accounts and change passwords; you would 
presumably want to hook this into the control panel's functions.

-- 
_ivan