On Thursday 02 March 2006 19:00, John Hinton wrote:
Anyway, in a virtual hosting environment, the last thing you want to do is make the mistake of assigning anyone a username such as info, games, webmaster, postmaster, accounting and so on because if you do, they'll get all mail to info destined for any domain on the machine which does not have a info@ address.
Towards this end, I've long had a convention of:
1) all accounts get a 2-4 char id that's semi-descriptive. EG: "Western Oak Cabinets" might get "woc"
2) All UIDs created to satisfy that customer account get prepended with that id, then an underscore. Eg: "woc_info".
This makes it very easy to parse /etc/passwd with a script and tie it to the accounting system with a regex and a few hashes in Perl/PHP/Python. Orphaned accounts are thus almost completely transparent, since they just won't match up to a list of currently paying customer accounts.
3) An virtusertable entry is created pointing the "info@westernoakcabinets.com" to "woc_info".
All this is administered by some scripts (and some rote habit) established years ago. This has nothing particularly to do with websites, so your example of "http://my_site.com" has never come up as an issue.
-Ben