What is Cobalt control panel used for?

Cobalts are very easy to use. They come with a very easy to use GUI control panel. You only need a web browser to run it. 

The control panel has two levels:

• 1. Site administrator - this would be the owner of the virtual site. They will have a control panel for the site only (remove/add user, remove/add email, create a mailing list, manage disk space, back up files, etc.)
  
• 2. Site user panel -change user name, password, set up email options, monitor use of disk space, etc.
  We recommend to go to http://www.demo.cobalt.com/for a demo of the control panel."
  

Here are the steps for setting up your virtual website. EXAMPLE: www.yourdomain.com/siteadmin

Allow 72 Hours for Domain Name to be moved, you will not be able
to access your site until the domain is resolving correctly

• From your domain register change the name servers
      Primary DNS server hostname = ns1.virtualcobalts.com
      Secondary DNS server hostname = ns2.virtualcobalts.com
• Use an ftp client or Front page to add your files to your site
• Login with webmaster as user name and your password for front page extensions.
• Setup your admin by using your assigned password at www.yourdomain.com/siteadmin
• Use the FAQ to setup services
• That should do it

You have to enable the English version of Internet Explorer. First, ensure that you have the latest version of Internet Explorer. Then go into the menus: Tools-<Internet Options->Languages).  Click on "Add" button and select "English (United States) [us-en]"  from the list. Then make sure English is set to be first or else it will not work."

To set up email forwarding accounts and aliases:

• Go to the Site Management section for the virtual site you wish to configure.
• Click the User Management button.
• Select the user you wish to modify and click the corresponding Email icon.
• To configure Email Forwarding, enter a single email address where you'd like mail to be forwarded. You cannot specify multiple recipients here. You must use the Email Alias feature if you wish to forward mail to more than one address.
• For Email Aliases, you may specify multiple destination addresses within the current domain. By default, the system is configured to prevent adding aliases outside the current domain.

To address a user by an alias, a sender must always include the hostname in the recipient's email address unless Accept Email for Domain is selected in Site Management under Site Settings. Most users will wish to enable this feature.

In order to create a "catch-all" email account which receives mail sent to any username at a given domain name, add @domain.com to the Email Aliases field and click Save Changes. This will cause all mail sent to any address @domain.com to forward to this user. Note that the next time you load this user's Email Settings screen, this entry will no longer appear in the Email Aliases field due a bug in the Cobalt Control Panel. You must add @domain.com each time you update this users mail forwarding settings.

After creating a virtual site, you can add or remove users for that site as well as creating a site administrator. From the Server Management screen, follow these steps to create a site user or site administrator:

• Click Site Management from the Administrator Site.
• Click the modify icon for the site to which you want add a user.
• Click Add User.
• Enter the information for the user you wish to create.
• Click Confirm New User.

In order for users to receive mail, they will need to use an email client which supports POP3 or IMAP4. These features are implemented by most all modern email clients such as Eudora, Microsoft Outlook, and Netscape Communicator.

You can use the following guidelines when setting up your email client:

• Email address: Your email address is username@domain, where username is a user which was created through the RaQ admin interface and domain is your domain name.
• POP (or IMAP) server (or incoming mail server): Enter the hostname or IP address of your Cobalt server.
• SMTP Server: Enter the hostname or IP address of your Cobalt server or the hostname or IP address of your internet provider's SMTP server. Please read Configuring an SMTP server for more information.

Anonymous FTP sites often become a storage area for pirated software, mp3 files, and other undesirable content. Please take this into consideration before creating an anonymous FTP site.

Anonymous FTP allows users without passwords to download and upload files via FTP within the specified disk-space limit. The site administrator is able to set the limits on the amount of files that can be uploaded anonymously and the total number of anonymous users who can access the site simultaneously. The FTP Settings section is displayed as a read-only status page for site administrators who are not the system administrator.

To change the FTP settings for your site:

• Click FTP Settings from the Site Management screen.
  
• Enter the settings you wish to use.
  
• Click Save Changes.
  

In order to download files via anonymous FTP, log onto the site with the username guest or anonymous. There is no need to enter a password. When you log on with one of these usernames, you'll enter the directory /home/sites/sitename/ftp. Any files which are uploaded to this directory are made available for download via FTP. Site administrators may access the anonymous FTP directory as /ftp during an FTP session. Once you've uploaded a file, anonymous users can not see it or access it on the FTP site; any registered site users with Telnet/shell privileges can access it. The size limit specified for FTP uploads is the total amount of disk space allocated for FTP uploads. If this number is set to 0, guests cannot upload files to the FTP site.

Web site usage statistics are generated automatically once the administrator selects the usage reports checkbox when creating a new site. In order to enable web stats on a site which as already been created:

• Click Site Settings from the Site Management screen.
• Check the usage reports box - you can choose between "None", "Daily", and "Weekly" reports.

• Backup weekly all sites.
• Backup data from the control panel to your home system then copy to media

There is no web-based administration feature which allows you to password protect a web directory. This will need to be done from a telnet session. This example illustrates how to password protect a user's web page. This procedure can be applied to any web documents on your server:

• Log into the Cobalt via SSH.
• Change directories to the directory you wish to protect and create a file called .htaccess which contains the following lines:
  order allow,deny
  allow from all
  require valid-user
  Authname DirectoryName
  AuthPAM_Enabled off
  Authtype Basic
  AuthUserFile/home/sites/sitename/users/username/htpasswd
  

The AuthUserFile should point to a file in the which contains a list of users and their encrypted password strings. This file is created with the htpasswd program. In order to create this file, run the following commands in a telnet session from within the directory where you wish to create the file:

/usr/bin/htpasswd -c htpasswd

You will be prompted for a password, and then prompted again to verify. If the htpasswd file already exists, omit the "-c" from the command indicated above.