Chapter

Preferences & Layout

This chapter details basic procedures such as logging in and layout customization.

Logging In:

You can login to your CM using a web browser (1E 6.0 recommended). Simply point the browser to http://your-server-name.domain.tld:port OR http://your-server’s-ip:port “port” is the port-number you chose to bind the Command Matrix to at the time of installation.

Example: http://servername.etrinix.com:5590 OR http://10.0.0.1:5590

Once you see the login page, enter your username/password in the designated fields and click the “Submit” button.

In case you forgot your password, you can retrieve it from the database using the “Forgot Password” link. Once there, you can enter your login ID and click “Submit”. Yu will receive the password in an e-mail sent out to the e-mail address you set when editing your contact info.

Setting Preferences:

Once you have successfully logged in, the link to “Preferences” can be found in the navigation to the left. Here you can change your Contact Information and your CM administration password.

Contact Info:

You can edit/update your contact info in this section. While editing the contact info, please bear in mind that the e-mail you enter in your contact details is the e-mail address used by the system to contact you. Please ensure that this e-mail does not point to an address on the same server. This would help to avoid and complexities.

Admin Password:

The admin password is the password for your main account (usually ecmadmin). Changing this password updates the CM password and the password for your main e-mail account. However, when a reseller uses this section to change/update their password, their CM, Email, FTP and FrontPage (if enabled) passwords are changed.

It is essential that you use an alphanumeric password with at least one special character ( ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ? > < : ; ) to ensure security. The length of your password should be at-least six character long. For example, a good password would be: “QP7bc%n9J” (nine characters).

Control Panel Options:

CM Skins:

Here you can customize the header for the CM, allowing you to brand the control panel with your Title text and graphics. All three graphics visible in the header can be changed.

In order to change the logos, you can simply click the “browse” button next to each field designated for the graphics, locate the image of your choice and upload it by clicking the “Update” button.

In order to change the title of the pages, simply replace the text in the field marked “Enter Page Title”.

You can also choose to show/hide the link to the support page for the CM.

Adding Custom Links:

Adding custom links is extremely easy too. All you need to do is enter comma separated additional links in HTML, for example

<a href="http://www.anysite.com/mypage1.html">Link-1 Name</a>,

Welcome Email:

This section can be found on the same page. Once you add a reseller account, the CM informs the client that their account has been setup by sending out an email. You can use this section to edit this welcome e-mail.

Enter the e-mail address you wish to send out the welcome e-mail from, in the “From” field. This can be any e-mail address – most commonly billing@yourcompany.com or sales@yourcompany.com are used. It is not necessary that this address exist on the server locally (you can also use username@hotmail.com). This is the address the client sees the welcome e-mail originated from.

The “Subject” field should contain the subject of your welcome e-mail. For example “Welcome to Provider Inc. – Important info about your reseller account.”

Some pre-defined variables can be used in the body of the welcome e-mail. These variables are:

<EAM-SITE-DOMAIN> - The domain name for the account created.

<EAM-SITE-TEMP-DOMAIN> - The temp URL your client can use to browse their site while they wait for the domain to propagate.

<EAM-SITE-ADMIN-ID> - Your client’s User-ID

<EAM-FTP-ADDRESS> - The FTP address for the account

<EAM-SITE-RESELLER-NAME> - Your company’s name. (The value you entered for the field “name” when editing your contact info.)

We shall be adding new variables and will keep everyone posted via the forums at http://etrinix.com/forum/.

Chapter

Reseller Plans & Accounts

Learn how to create reseller plans/accounts.

eseller plans enable you to create your own custom reseller packages and are a critical function in the CM. These plans form the core of your web hosting business, and your pricing structure needs to be carefully thought out. CM helps you in this process by allowing you to customize a large number of parameters, from the disk space and bandwidth to the number of domain aliases and DSNs, as well as specifying whether PHP, Perl, ASP, .NET and MySQL/PHPmyAdmin are provided.

Please note that the server admin can create only RESELLER plans/accounts, which should not be used for normal hosting clients. Once a reseller account is created, it can be used to add “Hosting Plans” and “Hosting Accounts”.

Creating A Reseller Plan:

To create a reseller plan, you need to perform the following steps:

1. Click on “Reseller Plans” in the navigation to the left.

2. Click on “New Plan Wizard”

3. Enter a name for the plan in the “Plan Name” field.

4. Enter the number of domain aliases you wish the reseller to be able to use, in the “Domain Alias” field. These are NOT sub-domains (not mapped to their own directories) and all alias records point to the main web-root directory. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

5. The “FTP Accounts” field should contain the number of FTP accounts you wish the reseller to be able to create. Please note that if this number is lesser than “Sites Limit”, the reseller would not be able create new hosting accounts once the FTP account limit has been reached. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

6. “Mail Accounts” is where you input the number of e-mail accounts you wish the reseller to be able to create. As for FTP accounts, it is necessary that each hosting account have at-least 1 mail account. Therefore, this should also be at least equal to the value you input into the “Sites Limit” field. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

7. Auto-responders are the total number of e-mail auto-responders that the reseller can create or allocate to their hosting accounts. These can only be activated on existing POP mail accounts. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

8. Mail Forwarders are the total number of e-mail forwarders that the reseller can create or allocate to their hosting accounts. These can only be activated on existing POP mail accounts. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

9. In the “Sites Limit” field, you should enter the total number of sites you wish the reseller to have authority to create. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

10. You can allocate bandwidth to a plan by entering the amount of monthly transfer allowed (in MB), into the “Bandwidth” field. This is a cumulative total of bandwidth for HTTP, FTP, POP and SMTP. The reseller can only stay within this limit when creating hosting accounts. You can always use “-1” to indicate unlimited.

11. You can allocate the total disk quota (in MB), by entering a value in the “Disk Quota” field. The reseller will not be allowed to exceed this limit when creating accounts.

12. Click “Continue”.

13. In this screen you will see the different add-ons available on the server. These add-ons include ASP, Perl, PHP, ODBC, FP Extensions and Webalizer. Choose which add-ons you want to be made available for a reseller created using this reseller plan.

14. The “Limit” column is where you define how many add-ons a reseller can use for his/her own site or allocate to their clients. If the “Enabled” field is checked, one for each add-on enabled shall be allocated to the reseller’s website.

Example:

In the previous screen, you allowed the reseller to create only 20 hosting accounts by entering the value “20” into the “Sites Limit” field.

In this screen you allow the reseller 10 ASP add-ons and also check “Enabled”.

Now a reseller can only create 9 ASP enabled hosting accounts, as 1 “ASP” has been used by their website themselves.

They can, however, still create the 20 hosting accounts allocated to them out of which only 9 can have the ASP addon.

You can always use “-1” in the Limits field to designate “Unlimited”.

15. Once you are done selecting the add-ons, click “Finish”.

Your Reseller Plan has been created. You can edit/delete a Reseller Plan by clicking the “Edit” or “Delete” links on the “Reseller Plans” screen.

You can sign-in to a reseller’s control panel by using the reseller’s username and YOUR (server admin’s) password.

Editing A Reseller Plan:

To reach this section, click “Reseller Plans” in the navigation bar, and then edit any of the listed/created plans.

The different fields in this section have already been explained above. Simply apply the same knowledge here to edit your existing plans and save/update when you are done.

Creating A Reseller Account:

This is where you actually create a reseller account based on the Reseller Plan(s) you created.

1. Click on “Reseller Accounts” in the navigation on the left.

2. Click “New Account Wizard”.

3. Input the necessary details into the fields provided. (‘*’ marks required fields)

4. Choose the reseller plan you wish to create this account under. (“Package” field)

5. Press “Continue”.

6. This next screen allows you to enter a start/end date for your account. This is of no great significance currently but it is planned to use these fields in conjunction with the planned billing system. The billing system shall be integrated with the CM in the near future.

7. The name-server fields allow you to enter the name-servers for this domain. These can be either the local name-server on the machine itself or some remote name-servers you use for DNS records. These values are used for the zone files created locally for bind and do not affect any other setting.

8. FTP Quota is the quota you assign the reseller for his/her own website. For instance, if you create a reseller with the domain “a-reseller.com”, the space they can use for the website accessible via http://a-reseller.com. The rest of the allocated web-space can be used for POP accounts or the hosting accounts created under the reseller.

9. The “Site Indexed” feature turns on/off site indexing for the account.

10. Via the “IP Address Type” field, you can choose whether to create the account using a dedicated or shared IP.

11. You can set the IP Address you wish to use for the account being created in the field “IP Address”.

12. The “IP Options Allowed” field determines whether or not the reseller is authorized to create plans based on a dedicated IP or not. (IP-Based / Name-Based Hosting)

13. Click “Finish”.

Your Reseller Account has been created. You can edit/delete a Reseller Account by clicking the “Edit” or “Delete” links on the “Reseller Accounts” screen.

Editing A Reseller Account:

In order to reach this section, click on Reseller Accounts in the navigation bar.

After creating a Reseller Account, you can either edit or completely delete the account. In order to edit the account, simply click on edit and change the values for the different fields available.

Custom Welcome/Placeholder Page:

One extremely useful feature in the CM is the ability to create a custom placeholder or welcome page, which is placed in the web-root (www) folder of all Reseller Accounts created.

The path to the folder that should contain the welcome page is <installation-drive>:\etrCM\etrSkeletonFolder . So, if you installed the CM on the ‘C’ drive, the path would be C:\etrCM\etrSkeletonFolder.

Any file or folder placed within this DIR gets duplicated in the ‘www’ folder of every reseller account created.

Chapter

Mail Options

Create/Manage mail accounts

Creating An Email Account:

In order to create a new e-mail account, you must have a certain amount of space free as to set the quota on.

1. The email address’s User ID (user6@domain.com, where user6 is the ID) is to be entered into the tab next to ‘User ID.’

2. At-least an 8-letter/digit password is needed for this field, a special character ( ~ ! @ # $ % ^ ? > < : ; ) must also be included in it.

3. Check Catch All to enable the property for this user’s email address.

4. Check Auto Responders to enable Auto Responders for this account. This enables the user to create an auto-responder for the account.

5. Check Mail Forwards to enable the property for this account. This enables the user to create a forwarder for the account.

6. Check Attachments to enable the user to receive/send attachments with e-mails.

7. A certain amount of space must be allotted to the user. This can be at-least 1 and at most XX MB (depending on how much of it is available or has not been allotted yet).

8. Click Update to activate this account; this completes the procedure.

Editing An Existing Email Account:

Once an account is created, its properties can be changed according to your wishes. Just click ‘Edit’ next to the account’s address, and set the properties accordingly.

Disk Quota: Modify (in MBs) to effect the available storage space for this account.

Edit Auto-responders: Edit the settings within to change the properties of the auto-responders (if enabled).

Edit Mail Forwarders: Edit these settings to change the properties of the mail forwarders (if enabled).

Chapter

WebMail (Mail Matrix)

The Web-Mail Module for Mail Matrix

Logging In:

In order to log into the web-mail, you must click on the icon labelled ‘WebMail’ at the front page of your CM interface. This will lead you to a login page, where, in the first field you must enter your email address (user@domain.com) and in the second tab goes your password (for user@domain.com). Once this is done, you’ll be taken to the WebMail/Mail Matrix interface.

You can also access the webmail interface via http://server.domain.com/webmail.

Reading Email:

Once you’ve logged on successfully to the Mail Matrix, you will immediately see a list of received emails in the folder Inbox. Clicking on any of these messages will open that specific message.

In order to change folders, for example to ‘Trash Can’ or ‘Sent Messages’, you can use the drop down list of folders (top left).

Composing Email:

To compose/send an e-mail, click ‘Write Mail’ in the navigation on the top.

1. Write the recipient’s address(es) in the ‘To:’ field. In order to write e-mails to addresses stored in your Address Book, we recommend clicking on Address Book first and selecting the recipients’ addresses. Click OK when done to return to the composing email section.

2. Write down the subject of the message in the ‘Subject:’ field.

3. Compose the body of the message in the space given below.

4. Files can be attached to the message in the following manner:

o Click on any of the ‘Browse’ buttons below the body of the message to select file(s) to be added to the message.

o The file(s) will not be uploaded instantly but will be transmitted directly through your drive once you are ready to send the e-mail message.

o Only 3 files can be attached to the message simultaneously.

5. Click on ‘Save a copy to sent folder’ in order to save a copy of your message to the Sent folder. This can be read or resent at any given time, provided it is not deleted.

6. The Priority field sets the importance of the message, marking it with an exclamation in the recipient’s mailbox so that the importance of the message can be highlighted.

7. Now, if you’re ready to send your mail, press Send. If you change your mind, press Reset to write a new message or Cancel to cancel the composition.

Managing The Address Book:

The Address Book can be reached simply by clicking the link labeled ‘Address Book’ in the navigation bar at any time.

Here, you will be able to store e-mail addresses with other relevant information regarding someone. Just follow the instructions on the screen to add a new contact.

Once this is done, you can use the Address Book to simply choose which person your mail will be delivered to. This can be done in any of the three fields, either ‘CC’, ‘BCC’ or ‘To’.

There are no limits as to how many contacts can be stored in your Address Book, but it is recommended that you do not clutter the Book with unnecessary information/contacts.

Managing Folders:

In order to reach this part of the Mail Matrix, simply click on Manage Folders at any time in the navigation bar.

Once clicked, you will reach a page showing information/stats regarding your current folders. In order to add a new folder, simply write the folder’s name in the bottom-most tab and click New.

Once you have a new/custom folder on your list, you have the options to either remove the folder completely, including all the messages stored in it, or simply empty the folder deleting only the messages stored within and not the folder itself.

NOTE

You can create as many folders as you want; there are no limits as to how many folders one can create. If you think some messages in a particular folder are taking up too space, you can simply delete one message or the other, or delete them all in one go by selecting ‘empty folder’.

Preferences:

Your preferences determine how your mail account is customized for your needs.

Changing Mail Password:

In order to reach this section, click on Preferences and then “Change Password”.

If you’re uncomfortable with your current mail password, we recommend that you change your password through this section.

The current password (in use) is to be typed in the Current Password field. This step is a security measure taken to ensure and double-check that it is indeed the owner that is changing the password and not someone else.

The new password goes in the New Password field, which is confirmed once again in the next field - Retype New Password.

We recommend that the passwords always be complex ones, with at least 1 special character and random use of capital letters. Once again, this is completely up to you.

Change User Info:

This section can be reached by clicking “Preferences”, then “Change User Info”.

This section lets you manage your personal information stored for your personal email account. This information is completely confidential.

Just fill out the form following the on-screen instructions. Click Save when done.

General Mail Preferences:

This section can be reached by clicking on Preferences, then Mail Preferences.

This section is concerned with the general settings of your e-mail account; what name appears on your message, saving sent messages, etc.

From Name: By changing this field, you will be changing the name that appears on the bottom of your sent messages.

Save Sent Messages: By selecting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in this field, you will determining whether to save your sent messages in a folder, or not. This is entirely up to you, as are all the settings in this section.

Messages per Page: By changing this field, you will be changing the number of messages shown in a folder in a single page. The higher the number of pages, the longer it takes to load that page.

View Screen Width: Changing this field determines the width of the lines that display your e-mail message (its body). The minimum for this field is 40.

Compose Screen Width: This field determines the width of the lines that display the composing field when you’re writing a message to someone. The minimum for this field is 40.

Signature: This field determines what message/caption is attached to the bottom of every sent message. This is, once again, to be written and used by you; therefore it is completely up to you. The maximum number of characters to be used for this is 500.

Auto-Responder: Whatever is written in this field will be sent to everyone and anyone who sends you an e-mail message, as a confirmation that you have indeed received their e-mail. This should be concise and the maximum number of characters to be used for this field is 200.

Forwarding Email: If you decide to have a copy of every message received on your e-mail account, you must enter the new email account’s address here. Every single message received thereon will be forwarded to that account.

Save you settings once done modifying these fields.

Setting An Auto-Responder:

In order to reach this section you must first click on Preferences and then on Mail Preferences.

Auto Responders can be set by simply filling up the space given here to your liking with messages like: ‘Your message has been received. We/I will get in touch as soon as possible, Thank you.’

You must fill the field that follows with e-mail addresses if you wish you enable Auto Responders for only a few, chosen e-mail addresses. Separating the addresses with comas enables you to set the auto-responder up so that it responds to mail from multiple email addresses. For example: “user1@lycos.com, user2@yahoo.com, user3@fictional.com”

In order to enable Auto Responders for every message received, simply leave this field blank. Your Auto Responders are now working, provided you remembered to click “Save”.

Setting An Email Forwarder:

In order to reach this section, you must click on Preferences in the navigation bar, and then Mail Preferences.

There is only one field that needs to be filled here. Write down the e-mail address of the account you want all your mail forwarded to, and then save your settings. You can choose to check “Forward as copy” if you wish to save copies of every message forwarded to you.

NOTE

Only the messages that are received after modifying this field will be forwarded and not before that.

Managing Spam Filters:

In order to reach this section, click on Preferences in the navigation bar, then “User/Domain Filters”.

This option is enabled in order to filter messages, whether malicious or otherwise, and to either save them to another folder (other than the Inbox) or to simply delete them when they are received.

Just type the address or the domain of your choice in the tab here and select what you want to do with every message received from this side. You can either move it directly to Trash or any other folder of your choice.

If a domain is entered in this field, the requested action will be done on every email received from that domain. For example, if you type in hotmail.com, every message from the domain “hotmail.com” (user@hotmail.com, user8888@hotmail.com, etc) will be sent to the folder of your choice.

If you want only specific addresses to be blocked, simply type in the exact address of the sender in this field and choose your desired action. For example, if spam@spammer.com is entered here, every message received from this address will be sent to the folder you chose.

Chapter

Advanced Options

Server Administration Tasks

Database Options:

If you have enabled the support for MySQL upon installation, this link appears in the navigation to the left. This section enables you to perform general administration tasks on the MySQL server via PHPMyAdmin. You should be very careful when using this section to manage MySQL as all databases created on the MySQL server would not only be visible, but also editable!

Please make sure you do not edit/delete the database “mysql” as it contains vital information about all databases/users created on the MySQL server.

You can also use this section to access the documentation for PHPMyAdmin.

Backup:

You can use this section to backup the following:

o Commad Matrix Database and All Other Application Files

o Commad Matrix Database Only

o DNS zone files

o User Websites

o User Mails

All backups are currently compressed (ZIP) and stored on the same HDD/Partition you installed the CM on. Yu can click “Download” to download the files to your local hard drive.

Automatic restoration using these backup is not currently supported, however, this is a planned feature and shall be available soon.

Manage Services:

All services running on your server can be started/stopped through this section. This allows you to control the services running on your server without having to log-in via Terminal Services or any other third party software.

Please make sure that the following services are kept running at all time to ensure smooth operation of the CM:

1. IIS Admin Service

2. ISC Bind

3. Etrinix Application Monitoring Service

4. Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP)

5. MySQL (If installed)

Reboot Server:

In order to reboot your server, simply click the button marked “OK” on this page. Your server will shutdown immediately, and will get back up in just a short while, provided there aren’t any errors in its configuration.

Change Server Domain/IP:

This section can be used if, for some reason, you wish to change the domain name or the main IP address for your server. Caution needs to be exercised when changing the IP address via this interface, as it will render your CM license invalid!

Please contact Etrinix Customer Support before you change the IP address using this interface.

Fixing File/Folder Permissions:

If for some reason files become inaccessible for any one of your users, you can fix permissions using this interface. Complete control over permissions has not been provided as that could potentially render the CM dysfunctional.

You can, not only choose the resellers you wish to fix permissions for but also fix permissions for a particular website under the reseller.

Support:

Etrinix Support can be contacted at:

1. support@etrinix.com

2. http://etrinix.com/cservice/pdesk.cgi

Chapter

Known Issues

Some Known Issues/Problems

PHPMyAdmin:

PHPMyAdmin will not work under some conditions where php.ini does not contain the following directive:

“cgi.force_redirect = Off”

To fix, just add the above in a line by itself at the end of the file “php.ini” (found under the windows directory).

FrontPage + SQL:

When one manually enables the FrontPage Server Extensions on a website, folder permissions for that website are not set properly (as per CM requirements), and the website admin user gets read-only access. This does not happen when you enable FP using the CM. It is therefore requested that FP not be enabled/installed manually for any website under ANY circumstance.

Following is from Microsoft's Website addressing issues with FP Server Extensions Administration Utility and MS SQL.

Quote: “After you change the database connection password for your SharePoint team Web site, you cannot use your Microsoft Office Server Extensions-based Web sites for discussions or collaborations.”

Please refer to :

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q292644&

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/sharepnt/proddocs/admindoc/owsl01.asp

The Administration utility for FrontPage Server Extension uses MS SQL Server Desktop engine, even if there is no SQL Server installed on the server. When you install an SQL Server on the machine, the password of

"sa" (Administrative User of MS SQL Server) is blank (by default). The Administration utility for FrontPage Server Extensions stops working when you change the password of the user "sa". To manage this, one needs to redefine the installation defaults manually, for FP Administration.

Please keep in mind that whenever you change the password for the user 'sa' (MS SQL Server), you will need to redefine the "installation defaults" for FrontPage Server Extensions. To do so, follow the instructions below:

o Open ISM (Internet Service Manager)

o Right click ‘Microsoft Sharepoint Administration”

o Click ‘Browse”

o On the Server Administration Page in IE, click on the link named “Set Installation Defaults”

o On the “Set Installation Defaults" page, under the heading "Database Settings”

o Enter the database server name, database administrator user name and database administrator password.

o Click “Submit”