Re: virtual hosting

[Andy Poling <andy@realbig.com>]

On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Eugene Crosser wrote:
> I wonder if anyone has done this and/or have any brilliant ideas...

Yep - BTDT.  I'll tell you what I can without divulging any important
secrets (I did this for a client)...

While it's probably obvious, I'll state this anyway: this is the way we did
it, but it's not necessarily the "One True Way".  Our solution is currently
handling 3-4000 virtual domains.


> We are planning to provide virtual mail domains, prefferably on a
> single machine.  I see a few ways to implement this, from using
> fqdnaliases (zero modifications in the source) to modifying the
> mailbox transport to deliver different domains to different 
> directories and quering some database instead of getpwnam()
> (requires some programming), all having some drawbacks.

We ended up using the routes database (automatically rebuilt if things
change) to route mail for the virtual domains to a seperate channel from
mailbox, and then wrote a local mailer that handled everything else from
there.

We did it this way so that we need not modify the Zmailer internals... to
make future Zmailer updates painless.


> Another problem will be IMAP/POP server, so if you know any solutions
> for that, please let me know.

We had to grub about in the c-client library and essentially create a
seperate passwd and shadow file for these mailboxes since there were
username collisions between the various virtual domains.

-Andy