Hi

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate list for my question, but I think most of you have more than enough knowledge in web hosting.

I have a dedicated server (Debian Sarge) which I mainly use for my own purpose. Until yet I've done every change like adding a user or creating a database over the shell. That was nice, I got routine in Linux administration. But since a few months some friends have got accounts for web and mail on the server. Managing everything by hand is getting really uncomfortable. I'd like to have an easy solution for my friends to manage their accounts on their own. They are non-paying "customers", therefore I don't need a billing system. Just creating mail and ftp accounts, creating MySQL databases, managing mail forwardings and DNS records would be enough. Quota and traffic limiting is not needed.

There are many different management tools. I found VHCS, syscp and ISPconfig. They all support what I need, so I installed VHCS. It works fine as long as every setting is made over the browser. When I change a Bind zonefile by hand it gets overwritten by VHCS with the entries in the DB. Syscp and ISPConfig seem to behave accordingly.

Is there a tool which _reads_ a config file and adds its entries, instead of writing the whole file from its DB? Or do I have to decide between manual and automated administering?

Which managing system do you use? I saw that Init7 uses VHCS. (Which is the reason that I tried it first.) Have the other providers created their own account management system? Which system can you recommend? I prefer Open Source Software.

If I understood correctly, VHCS, syscp and ISPconfig only manage one server. I'd like to have the same mail accounts and dns zones on a secondary server (backup MX, secondary DNS). Any idea how to manage that? I thought maybe I can install VHCS on both systems and copy the VHCS DB to the secondary server using MySQL replication. But you probably got a better solution.

Thank you very much for your help!

Cheers Manuel