Aide AlternC v3

DNS Slave Servers and alternc.net

Alban Crommer — 2013-10-17T18:36:18Z

Word of warning

You must have a thorough knowledge in the DNS system, or precise instructions from your hosting provider or system administrator when changing the values in both pages.

It changes the way the domain lists and domain name resource records are exchanged between your server and the secondary dns servers.

You should leave this management to these people if you don't want to bring your entire server and all your domains in a complete havoc!

Again, please remind the following admin control panel sections are not to be messed with unless you know what you are doing.

Requirements

These features are natively supported by AlternC.

To enable a server as a master server, it is required to install on it the alternc-slave package.

if [[ ! $(dpkg -l alternc-slavedns) =~ "ii" ]] ; then aptitude install alternc-slavedns; fi;

Also, please note that if you want to enable different DNS servers than the ones you provided during the installation of AlternC, you must edit the /etc/alternc/local.sh file and reload the alternc.install script.

# vim /etc/alternc.local.sh ... edit the following lines .... NS1_HOSTNAME="ns1.my-ns-domain.tld # Secondary DNS hostname NS2_HOSTNAME="ns2.my-ns-domain.tld" ... save and run ...
# /usr/sbin/alternc.install

Introduction

AlternC allows you to define some servers as DNS slaves or masters for your domain zones.

A good use case for this feature is when you have many servers (slaves) and you want to use your own name servers (masters). In this case, you'll want the master server to read the list of domaines installed on each alternc slave, regularly retrieve the zones associated with these domains and add them to the name server database.

Note that the terms "master" and "slave" meaning in this documentation differs from the meaning of master / slave in classical DNS documentation, ie. primary/master and secondary/slave name servers.

Alternatively, you could also want to use this feature to replace entirely your registar DNS. In which case, you might want to read the information regarding the alternc.net service.

Manage allowed IP Addresses for slave DNS transfers

To enable a server to retrieve the domains zones, you need to allow its individual IPv4 address (/32) or allow subnets (ex: 10.1.1.0/24).

Manage accounts for slave DNS transfers

To enable a server to retrieve the domains list, you need to create a http-auth access.

This will allow the server to access the url http(s)://user:password@yourdomain.tld/dom_list.php which provides a one-domain-per-line document.

The alternc.net free service

The AlternC association provides a free service for users who need DNS servers to replicate their zones.

The servers are hosted in high quality datacenters to provide a solid resilience in case of failures.

The service is available on https://www.alternc.net.

To make it work, you need to allow the server IPs and provide them an http authentification as previously explained on this page.

Serveurs esclaves DNS et service alternc.net

Alban Crommer — 2013-10-17T18:36:14Z

Avertissement

Vous devez connaître le fonctionnement des DNS ou bien avoir reçu des instructions précises de votre hébergeur / administrateur système pour modifier les informations présentes sur ces interfaces.

Elles modifient la manière dont la liste des domaines et des enregistrements de noms de domaines sont échangés entre vos serveurs et leurs serveurs DNS secondaires.

Il est prudent d'en laisser la complète gestion à l'administrateur système (root) du serveur, sous peine d'être confronté à de graves dysfonctionnements !

Soyez donc précautionneux et ne modifiez pas les informations présentes dans les sactions suivantes si vous ne savez pas ce que vous faites.

Prérequis

Les fonctionnalités sont supportées nativement par AlternC.

Pour qu'un serveur récupère les zones DNS en utilisant le protocole spécifique alternc, il est en revanche requis d'y installer le package alternc-slave.
if [[ ! $(dpkg -l alternc-slavedns) =~ "ii" ]] ; then aptitude install alternc-slavedns; fi;

Introduction

AlternC vous permet de définir certains serveurs comme des esclaves ou des maîtres DNS de vos zones.

Par exemple, ceci est intéressant lorsque vous avez installé plusieurs serveurs avec AlternC et que vous souhaitez régulièrement qu'un serveur maître lise les zones des nombreux serveurs esclaves, les récupère en entier et les ajoute à sa base de donnée.

Notez que les termes "maître" et "esclave" ont ici une autre signification que celle qu'ils ont dans le système DNS soit maître / primaire et esclave / secondaire.

Un autre cas est que vous souhaitiez vous passer des serveurs DNS de votre registrar. Dans ce cas, vous trouverez probablement utile le service fourni par alternc.net.

Notez qu'au cas où vous modifiez les serveurs distribuant vos noms de domaines, vous devrez modifier le fichier /etc/alternc/local.sh puis relancer le script alternc.install.

# vim /etc/alternc.local.sh ... editer les lignes suivantes .... NS1_HOSTNAME="ns1.my-ns-domain.tld # Secondary DNS hostname NS2_HOSTNAME="ns2.my-ns-domain.tld" ... sauvegarder et relancer ...
# /usr/sbin/alternc.install

Gérer les ip autorisés à faire des transferts de zone esclave DNS

Pour autoriser un serveur à récupérer les zones de vos domaines, vous devez autoriser son adresse spécifique (/32) ou bien un subnet (par exemple 10.1.1.0/24).

Gérer les comptes autorisés pour les transferts de zone esclave DNS

Pour autorise un serveur à récupérer la liste des domaines installés sur votre serveur, vous devez créer un authentifiant http_auth lui permettant d'accéder à la page domlist.php ( ex: http(s)://user:password@mon-serveur.tld/domlist.php ) qui fournit une liste des domaines, un domaine par ligne.

Le service gratuit alternc.net

L'association AlternC fournit un service gratuit pour les utilisateurs ayant besoins de serveurs DNS pour distribuer leurs zones.

Les serveurs fournis sont hébergés dans des datacenters de haute qualité qui offrent une capacité de résilience élevée.

Ce service est disponible sur https://www.alternc.net.

Mode d'emploi
Pour faire fonctionner ce service :

utilisez les interfaces décrites dans cette page pour autoriser les IPs du service alternc.net
créez un accès utilisateur http
créez un compte sur le site alternc.net
ajoutez un serveur sur le site alternc.net
renseignez les champs avec
- le hostname de votre serveur
- son adresse IPv4
- la cache activée pour le transfert selon la méthode AlternC
- l'url d'accès à la liste des domaines (ie. http(s)://user:password@mon-serveur.tld/domlist.php)
- le certificat de votre serveur si vous servez le bureau en https et que vous utilisez un certificat auto signé. Ne fournissez que le certificat public, en collant les lignes situées entre "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----" et "-----END CERTIFICATE-----" du fichier probablement situé dans /etc/apache2/apache.pem

Change the rights of AlternC Administrator.

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-02-05T09:04:45Z

Restrict the rights of AlternC Administrator.

Depending on the knowledge of the administrator, and to prevent any mistakt,

You can limit the rights of the administrator to only be allowed to manage the accounts. He will not have any access to the administrator panel.

Restricted Administrator

There is only one administrator account in AlternC, it's "admin" and he has the account number 2000.
Other administrators can be defined, they will only be able to access the account management, and will see only the account the created, and not all the accounts on AlternC server.
Of course, they will not have any access to the Administrator Panel.

Give more rights to AlternC Administrator

You can also give more rights on your server to the administrator :
SSH access to the server, allowed for some actions, or
SSH access to the server and access to the "root" account, which means unlimited access to the server.

Be careful that this may break the service guarantee from your hosting provider.

Accounts management

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-02-04T22:00:21Z

The AlternC Administrator, in his Virtual Desktop, has an additional menu called "Admin".

The blue links in the Virtual Desktop of the administrator are the same as any other standard account. In this rubric we will only cover the red administrator-specific links.

The administrator account of AlternC

The AlternC Administrator, in his Virtual Desktop, has an additional menu called "Admin".

The blue links in the Virtual Desktop of the administrator are the same as any other standard account. In this rubric we will only cover the red administrator-specific links.

The "AlternC admin" main task is to administrate AlternC hosting accounts on the server. The terms "member" and "account" are used. AlternC was developed in a free software community, by a non-profit association, which explains the term used : "member" for the accounts.

The "AlternC Administrator" can create accounts, set their quotas (domain names, email accounts, mailing-lists etc.), give them administrative rights, block them, delete them, connect to any account, and therefore see all the other accounts' files...

The password of the "admin" account must be a REAL password (a mix of figures, special characters and low and up-case letters). This account is sensitive since it gives access to any account hosted on your server.

The Virtual Desktop menu is the same as any other account, except for one rubric, the "Administration" one, as shown below:

Account list

A click on the link "manage the members" shows you the list of all the accounts hosted on the server in the right side of the Virtual Desktop.

In this list, the accounts in red are the administrator or restricted administrator accounts.
This table contains 10 columns:

A checkbox (to delete an account);
A link "edit" to change the personal information of an account;
A link "quotas" to set the services quotas of an account;
A link "connect as" to impersonate into any other account as an administrator
The name of the account
The identity of the owner of the account, with a link to his email address
The type of account (if there is many account types on your server)
The date of last connection to this account
The number of connection attempts since the last successful connection.
The IP address of the last machine who tried to connect to this account

In this screenshot, we can see that the "octo" account never connect to the Virtual Desktop.

Here is an example of an account where someone tried to connect to with a wrong password:

The line with the hour and IP address of the last machine allows you to start searching more if there is suspicious connections to an account.

This table is also where you can create and delete accounts.

Account creation

To create a new account (usually named "member" by the server), it's as easy as when you created an email account.

Click the link "Create a new member"
Fill the form
Validate the form by clicking the button [Create a new member]

Login : The login that will be used for this account (it uniqely identifies the account and serve as a login to connect to the virtual desktop)
Initial Password : The password (to be confirmed in the next field) that the user can change later (or not changed if the administrator didn't gave him the ability to change his password).
Name / Firstname : The identity of the owner of the account.
Email Address : The email address where you will send password confirmation, or any other information about the server.
Account type : you should leave this value to the default, we will see it later on.

Note: The name of the account owner is not necessarily the one of the person that will manage the account.

Editing an account

A click on the "edit" link in the account list allows you to change some informations regarding an account.

To do it, just fill the form values as you want.

The "account enabled" dropdown list allows you to lock the user out of his account ("no" position). To allow him back, set it to "yes".

If you don't want to change the password of the account, leave the password field blank. It will not be changed.

The account type is about quotas. We will talk about it later.

The billing period is not enabled on our demo server since it's not a commercial one.

Warning: The link "Make this account an administrator one" gives administrator rights to the corresponding account. That way, he can create other accounts. Don't give this right to anybody!

Account quotas management

New users have default service quotas for each service (ftp, emails, domain names etc.). We will se later how to change the default quotas.

We will customize the quotas of the "demo" account. To do so, we clicked the "quotas" link for the "demo" account in the member list.

The form fields allows you to enter new quota values for each service. A column after each field shows you the used quota for each service for this user account (here, 2 ftp accounts are used, which is the maximum allowed for this user, that's why this value is red).

Click the button [Change the quotas] to save your quotas changes.

Connect to another account from the "admin" account.

Before clicking the "connect as " link on any account, ensure that the administrator or owner of the account allowed you to do so.

Warning: Don't open this link in a new tab or new window. AlternC don't allow you to be connected to many Virtual Desktop accounts at the same time.

When you click the "connect as" link, the Virtual Desktop of the chosen account shows instead of the administrator one. To go back to the "admin" account, you will have to logout and login back, using the admin login and password.

User Quotas

The link "User quotas" is available to any AlternC administrator. It shows you the space usage for each account, either in MB or in percentage used on the total service usage on the server. (figures or graphics).

Administrator panel

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-02-04T21:59:53Z

This menu is only available to administrators of the AlternC accounts. With this menu, you can manage your server.

We will see three examples below.

Manage Allowed TLD

A TLD (for Top-Level Domain) is a first level domain name such as .fr, .net, .org etc.

AlternC normally checks the DNS in the central WHOIS database before allowing them to be installed. It prevents installing non-existent domains or domains that will not work.

For some TLD's or some specific usage (such as when migrating a domain name) it may be important to be able to change the control made before installing a domain name.

WARNING : Some TLD such as the .fr one do the same control as AlternC before allowing any DNS change. So the default control in AlternC is "no control at all" so that you can install your domain name in the server before asking your registrar for DNS changes.

To change the way TLDs are controlled, just click the icon with a pen after its name, as shown in the example below.

You can also create new TLD for first-level or even second-level domain names that will, then, be considered as a TLD. That way, you can allow for example any user to add a subdomain of some specific domain names.

In this example, all the subdomains of logiciels-libres.biz can be installed without any control. Of course, if you allow a normal domain as a TLD, this domain's DNS must point to your server in order for the subdomains to work.

Change the default quotas

Each AlternC account has a set of quotas for each services as defined by the AlternC administrator.

When you click the link "Change the default quotas" in the "Administrator panel", you can see the default quotas that will be allocated to any new account.

You can also use different quotas set for different kind of AlternC accounts.

For example, you can create an quota set that will be named "Mini".

Here is the result: now we have 2 kind of accounts, one named "default" (the generic AlternC kind) and another one named "Mini".

List of domains installed in the server

This link shows all the domains currently installed in the server, and tells you on which AlternC account.

You can lock or unlock a domain. It blocks the install of this domain on any other server or account. The user cannot delete locked domains from his account. It can also prevent any wrong action from AlternC account users who don't know the Virtual Desktop well.

Warning: don't mix up domain lock in the AlternC Control Panel and the lock of an AlternC account see Editing an account

Configure AlternC variables

This link allows you to set some global configuration variables of AlternC. The first one is the domain name of the server. If you set it to a domain you own (and whose DNS should point to your server), any new account on the server will have a subdomain of this domain named after the AlternC account automatically installed, such as accountlogin.yourdomain.tld.

Example, for a domain name structure.org, you can create board.structure.org, team.structure.org, etc. who can in turn create subdomains in their accounts if needed (example: subteam.team.structure.org.)

Show all quotas

Click this link to see all the quotas of service used on all your accounts.

In fact, it shows all the quotas as in the "user quotas" link we saw earlier, but in a less convenient way ...

General SQL Admin

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-02-02T11:22:29Z

The link "General SQL admin" opens up a new window on your browser. It allows you to connect to any MySQL database hosted on the server, as long as you have a valid MySQL login and password. The database administration software is PhpMyAdmin.

You have to be very careful when connecting to MySQL administrator account since you can delete any data when using such account.

Others

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-01-27T21:38:34Z

Misc

The miscellaneous category shows us some more or less precise statistics on advanced features of the browsers used by the visitors, such as the plugins they have, (flash, java,pdf ...) their screen size etc.

HTTP Status Codes

The HTTP Status Codes show you the miscellaneous errors or special status encountered by your visitors on you website. Some are not counted in your web statistics. You can see that they are counted as "not viewed" visits.

When

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-01-27T21:34:49Z

Monthly History

The Monthly history shows you, month by month, the statistics of your website, as an histogram then as a table.

For example, in June 2009:
10 visitors did 52 visits. In the meantine, they saw 1528 pages and downloaded 10896 page elements, for a total of 46.06GB.

Statistics per day of the month

The next rubric shows the number of visits and statistics on these visits for each day of the month. The days with grey background are saturdays and sundays.

These statistics are shown as an histogram then as a table.

For example, on november 3rd, there were 212 visitors who saw 8422 pages and downloaded 21876 page elements, which consume 432.07MB of bandwidth.

Statistics per day of the week

This rubric shows you some statistics for each day of the week, and compute the average traffic for each day of the week, each monday, each tuesday ... of the current month.

These statistics are shown as an histogram then as a table, showing the following:

The average number of visited pages per day
The average number of hit per day
The bandwidth per day.

For example, in that case, the maximum of visits is on wednesdays, but the biggest bandwidth consumption is on Tuesdays.

Statistics per hour of the day

As for the statistics per day of the week, There is some statistics for each hour of the day. The average is computed for each hour of the day.

These statistics are, as usual, shown as an histogram then as a figure table, and shows the following information:

The maximum of visits for this website is around 11 - 12 in the morning, and the maximum bandwidth consumption hour is around 6 - 7 in the morning.

Browsing

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-01-27T21:34:47Z

Duration of the visits

These statistics compute the average duration of your visits, then it shows the number of visitors who spent a specified time from 0-30 seconds to 1h and more in your website.

The percentage of unknown visits duration is for the visits whose duration could not be measured.

Downloaded File Types

The Downloaded File Types statistics are written in decreasing order ; It's not the files themselves, but the file types depending on their extension (the string after the dot in the filenames).

The statistics on Downloaded File Types are counted by Hit count and consumed bandwidth.

Most downloaded pages ranking

These statistics shows the files themselves, from the most downloaded to the least downloaded one.

The address of the page is shown after the "/". The "/" represents the domain name, for example, here : « /index,php » means a visit of the page whose url is « www.aide-alternc.org/index,php ».

Operating System of the visitors

These statistics shows you the Operating System used by your visitors on their computers.

Visitors' Browsers

As for the Operating Systems, this information may be important to you, since it shows you which browser your visitors are using.

With these statistics, you know your visitors better and can adapt your website to their browser usage, and enhance the accessibility of your website.

Here, the statistics are biaised by the fact that we are using a testing platform.

Where

Benjamin Sonntag — 2010-01-27T21:34:43Z

Connection by referer

The origin of a visit is determined by the page where the visitor came from, just before coming into your website.

Awstats rank those visits using the following categories:

Direct address/Bookmarks: The visitor came directly into your website, either by typing your website address, or by clicking on a bookmark in its browser.
Link from a Newsgroup
Link from a search engine: When the visitor arrived in your website from a search engine. The link "Complete list" allows you to see the detailed list of search engines who brought your visitors into your website.
Link from an external page : The visitor came to your website by clicking a link inside another website.
Unknownj origin: These are the visitors whose origin cannot be determined.

Sentences and keywords

Sentences and keywords are the Sentences and keywords a visitor searched into a search engine on the Internet that brought him into your website.

This statistics is one of the most precious: It allows you to know how your website is referenced on the Internet.