Hi everyone, This is my first post here. More likley then not it isnt going to be my last. Ive installed RedHat 9.0 on an older computer in my home and was just hoping to run a very small webserver for friends. Email, domains, FTP stuff like that. Nothing fancy at all. Ive been working on it for a few weeks trying to grasp. Just a few questions ive been having, to be fair i am very new at all of this:

1. How exacly does apache know which files to bring up. Do you give the user FTP access to their home accounts and apache will read whatever they upload to that directory? Not sure on this.

2. How do i allow users to add their own email accounts or do i need to do that?

3. With VsFtpD how can i specify multiple users with diffrent passwords to access the same directory.

THank you for any help you might provide me.

1. This is in Apache's configuration (/etc/apache.conf iirc, or use a front-end configuration utility). The default should be /var/www/html
2. This one's kinda complicated. You could have a web-based front-end that would setup a user account on your system, but it would require CGI or PHP to work. "or do i need to do that" -- It depends. If you're setting up your server to be used by the general public, then yeah, but if it's just for your friends, and they can call you on the phone, it'd be much simpler to run "adduser <username>", then setup some web-based solution.
3. Honestly, no clue. You'd have to check the server's documentation. For security reasons though, I'd recommend SFTP, rather than FTP. SFTP works over SSH, and therefore encrypts it's inbound/outbound packets (i.e password data). To setup multiple users to access the same directory with it (and this probably would work with VsFtpD too), you'd simply setup each user with the same home dir (i.e "useradd firstuser -d /home/shared && useradd seconduser -d /home/shared"). I know there's a way to setup a chroot jail so that the user can't move outside their home dir as well (if you have perms setup correctly they can't write outside their home dir anyways, and shouldn't be able to enter other home dirs), but have never set it up myself.

Hope you get it all setup.