OK, I work in a school district and I'm fairly new to Linux. I've set up a DansGuardian box for web filtering and a Moodle (CMS) server for some online classroom environments.

I've recently been asked to set up a web server for a student so that he can set up a National Honor Society webpage. He's asked for a LAMP configuration. My question is this, how should the security be set up for this? Can I add his username on the LAMP box to the group www for him to have access to the entire web documents root?

Are my questions even making sense? If someone would be willing to help talk me through any other questions, I'd be GREATLY appreciative...

IS it possible to set the student up with a virtual host?
<National Honor Society>.site.edu

This would allow you to have to student have a user name and a public_html in his/her own dir and not have to access the root document root dir.

hmmm...I suppose so...I'd have to do some research on .htaccess and virtual domains, right? I'm not very familiar with the details of apache...basically I have it installed on a single server that I maintain and log in as root to manage...

check out ispconfig dot com. it may automate much of what you want to do. the implementations i've seen isolate users into their own ftp, www, ssh virtual domains.