ISPConfig 3, licensed under BSD, is an Open Source hosting control panel. It
seeks to soothe complications you might face during the set-up of different
services on public servers (Apache) such as DNS, multiple unique domain name
websites and email accounts on those websites. For instance managing a DNS
server using the config file manually is pretty difficult, which becomes much
simpler through ISPconfig. Setting up ISPConfig can be challenging, but after it
has been configured, using it is like a breeze. The steps for installation for
most Linux distros are similar.

ISPConfig lets you configure different services through a web browser. In
this article we guide you on how to prepare a Red Hat based (x86_64) server for
its installation.

From Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, MyDNS, Pure FTPd to
ClamAV, it lets you configure all these services and more through a web browser.
Common server administration and operation tasks, such as creating lots of new
user e-mail accounts, adding websites etc is also simplified.

Configuring ISPConfig
The installation of ISPconfig is pretty well documented at its website, so
we are not going to take you through the entire installation steps. For this
simply refer to http://bit.ly/4IiUwr. Instead we will talk about some key
challenges that we found while giving it a try.

To install ISPConfig onto your systems you can simply download the .iso image
of the OS that you want to install. You can install ISPConfig3 on Fedora 12
x86_64, OpenSUSE 11.2 x86_64, CentOS 5.4 x86_64, Ubuntu 9.10, Debian Lenny (Debian
5.0) and Fedora 10. We installed it on Fedora 12 x86_64.

While installing the OS you need to keep a couple of things in mind. First
you manually need to give a hostname to the installation. This hostname should
correspond to the registered domain name which you have on the Internet. Then
you have to give a static IP address and a gateway to it. A DHCP will not work
as ISPConfig assumes that the machine should either have a static Internet IP or
a static LAN IP which can be Natted for external access.

You can monitor the state of a server in real time. This feature is pretty handy in real world usage and is not available with cPanel.

In our test bed, we didn’t configure it with a live domain name, rather
tested it on our LAN with a random domain name. We gave ‘server1. example.com’
as the hostname followed by the LAN IP and the gateway.

You have to install all packages and reboot. After this, disable the firewall
and then edit the “device param” and “DNS configuration”.

Common errors
While installing suPHP, we got stuck in the

–with-apr=/usr/bin/apr-1-config
command.

In case you face the same error, then run:

–with-apr=/usr/bin/apu-1-config

Next, you need to manually create the file “ /etc/suphp.conf
” and restart Apache.

Once the configuration is over, check the panel by typing
the URL http://IP address:8080 or http://hostname:8080. Login with the default
username and password as ‘admin’.

In case you are not able to login, then replace

vi /usr/local/ispconfig/interface/lib/config.inc.php
: Line 49

with the following line

set_magic_quotes_runtime(0); with
ini_set(“magic_quotes_runtime”,0);

Also replace,

vi /usr/local/ispconfig/interface/lib/classes/
tpl.inc.php: Line 1230

with

ini_set(“magic_quotes_runtime”,0);

and replace Line 1232 with

ini_set(“magic_quotes_runtime”,($mqrt));

In the table we compare ISPConfig with cPanel, a popular
web hosting control panel.