Adding sites manually

First off, I'm currently hosting a few non-profit web sites from my Red Hat Linux box. Apache 1.3.27 serves the sites and related content, while pureftp takes care of FTP access.. and last, qmail handles the email. My "users" are also able to execute CGI scripts and they all have access to a MySQL database.

My question goes.. Whenever I add/setup a new site, I manually add a real user account(useradd). I do this because both SuEXEC for apache, and MySQL are configured to use this form of authentication. Then I add a almost identical, but "virtual" user account for pureftp to use..

As you can see, I have both a "real" system account AND a "virtual" user account for every user/site I've created? So what I want to know is, how would one go about all this, instead of doing it the way I do?

1. Create only a real system user account(valid UID/GID), and then configure every service (HTTP, FTP, MAIL) to point to this user's home directory whenever content is needed, and configure the given services to use UNIX user authentication only?

or

2. Just create "virtual" accounts for every service? (Because almost every daemon I use support this in some way..) and totally leave out the idea of using real system accounts?...this way might be more secure than the other, but also seems to be the most complicated..?

Thanks in advance! Adding sites manually

 

 

 

 

Top