Need Help Setting Up Xserve to Host Student Websites

[mrhayes]

I have two Xserves in my lab. One acts as Open Directory and stores all of the students’ home folders. I managed to figure out how to set it up and I create the student accounts from downloaded rosters using Passenger.

The other Xserve is setup as a Web server and is currently hosting my class page. In addition to hosting the class page, I want it to host student Web sites (~220 sites). My department and class sites are at http://chargertech.edisonchargers.com and http://chargertech.edisonchargers.com/maclab. The district just opened the firewall last week, so not all of the content is up yet.

Anyhow, I do not not know how to set it up so that my students have an ftp account and a folder to upload their sites. I’d like to be something like:

hxxx://server.com/students/student1/index.html
hxxx://server.com/students/student2/index.html
hxxx://server.com/students/student3/index.html
etc.

I assume there must be a fairly simple way to do this. Hosting companies do it all of the time and ISPs often provide Web space. I have Apache, FTP, and AFP running. I installed Webmin and tried messing with that, but had no clue. I want students to have only ftp access to their site. Also, I am hoping to make it as easy as possible like it is for the OD server using Passenger. I teach 5 periods, amongst other things, I don’t have a whole lot of free time to do accounts manually one by one. I appreciate any help. I am teaching myself as I go.

Oh yeah, it is a newer quad core Xeon runnning 10.5.5.

[mrhayes]

Yes, but the users are on separate OD Xserve. The Web server is a separate server. If I recreate the users on the Web server with Passenger, then it makes full home folders with docs, pics, movies, etc. and I don’t know how it works with restricting them via ftp. I don’t want all the extar folders, just an empty folder for them to ftp their sites.

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