Re: [cpx] www or not www that is the question... but not the only one ;)

[Scott Wiersdorf <scottw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 08:19:51PM -0500, Stormer's Cgi-Archive wrote:
> Hello All,

Stormer's is no longer on this list, but I feel some of this FUD
deserves a (non-Verio approved) reply (this is just me). Here we go...

> It seems to me...
> 
> #1 Not everyone sets up clients the same way.

Correct. Ok so far.

> #2 Viaverio sets up clients a "specific way".  Coff, what way would that be?

That would be the way specified in the support pages:

  <http://www.viaverio.com/support/vps/basic/admin/>

These are the suggested methods of adding users and virtual hosts.
They are fairly consistent internally. vaddhost is the official tool
written to add virtual hosts; it follows the same format as the
"Manually Configure Virtual Subhosts".

VPS v2 accounts that have followed this will have no problems setting
up CPX.

> #3 Viaverio is not really communicating the "proper steps" when setting up a
> customer on a vps2 via CPX.

Er, I disagree. See above URL.

> What is expected?  What is the CPX for?  What is it's purpose?  How does
> that help "resellers" become "better" resellers and have "resellers" under
> them?

CPX Phase 1 allows a reseller whose primary business is subhosting to
delegate the creation and management of end users, email addresses,
and domains to a "domain administrator".

Future releases will allow resellers to customize the CPX control
panel to suit their own business needs, selectively removing or adding
functionality, depending on your specific needs. It will also allow
resellers to propogate these customizations across all of their
accounts in a single CPX action.

> I think the #1 thing any reseller program could possible "promise" is the
> ability to have "resellers" under "resellers".   Is viaverio doing that with
> CPX?

Um, this sounds more like a business argument. I'm not even sure we're
doing that generally (without CPX). We'd certainly like to move that
direction, allowing resellers to selectively give limited ordering,
provisioning and even billing access to customers.

> Here we have a bunch of viaverio resellers attemping to "resell"  CPX and
> everything else under the sun that viaverio offers.   CPX is simply "NOT"
> finished.  If your installing this program on "live" production server...
> your in for problems.

It's obviously not meeting your needs--sorry. It is meeting the needs
of a whole bunch of other people, though. We had to choose which model
to support for the first release of CPX, and the current incarnation
provides the minimal philosophical base we wanted to create.

> CPX.  If they (viaverio) "really" wanted to have some GOOD feed back on
> it... don't make us "beta test it" with "live" accounts.  Yes, I purchased a
> new vps2 for beta testing... but you know what?

The beta test was done earlier last year with a selected group of
resellers. You weren't one of them, apparently. This release is not a
beta release. It does not meet all resellers needs and we're working
on meeting more of those as we go. Verio has given the CPX project
(since its phase 1 release) even more resources than it had during
development, which means that you should see fixes and new
functionality sooner.

CPX was designed for new VPS v2 accounts only. The reason for this
stance is because (as was pointed out earlier), some people (like
yourself perhaps) have become very efficient at doing things the wrong
way; we have no way to detect all custom configurations, etc.

We've done a lot of work (and expect to do quite a bit more) on the
installer so that it can figure out the myriad configurations out
there. Until we feel very comfortable with how it's working, we'll
continue the "new accounts only" stance (knowing that it actually does
work on most existing VPS v2 accounts that have followed the
recommended viaVerio setup as documented on the viaVerio website).

One example is the setup of virtual hosts on VPS v2: many people are
still using the old VPS 1 setup, with websites located in /www/vhosts.
Since the VPS v2 release, this setup has been discouraged (vaddhost
encourages /usr/home/<USER>/www/domain.tld, documentation was changed,
etc.).

The new recommended setup improves security, disk usage accounting,
and multiple site management (single login for all domains). If you
haven't followed recommended best practices (admittedly a moving
target, but it's been fairly stable since VPS v2 release), we're going
to have a harder time helping you use CPX, which enforces these
practices internally.

Enough. I'm not trying to be belligerent, but it sounds like you have
some unrealistic expectations, especially given that your preferred
setup apparently does not coincide with current best practices.

Scott
-- 
Scott Wiersdorf
scottw@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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