Folks Firstly, thanks to all those who replied... I am pleased to say that I have an Test installation working .. Whoohoo..! If anyone see's any gapping security, configuration holes or poor practices, please drop me a line, otherwise, I have document the how's and what's of what I finally ended up doing so that it might save someone else the time, effort and frustration I had. After much banging of heads, scratching of unmentionables and a "little" bit of swearing, I think I have it pegged... OK, start off with my major mistakes; 1) I chose to install the "pristine" application in a /home/<user> directory, this now appears to have been a bad choice due to permissions and access issues. I really just needed a non-root user account to actually run Zope, not a non-root user account to install it in... 2) I hadn't fully read and comprehended the zope.conf comments I have now read (numerous times) the comments and am beginning to get a better understanding of the intracasacies Our Environment; CentOS 4.2 x86_64 cPanel Management Zope 2.8.2-final, python 2.3.5, linux2 Python Version 2.3.5 (#2, Sep 28 2005, 03:41:37) [GCC 3.4.3 20050227 (Red Hat 3.4.3-22.1)] What I have done now; 1) I have installed the "pristine" application under /usr/local/Zope, configured zope to run as the original planned user (zope.conf > effective-user parameter) (I actually just copied the original, modified zope.conf and runzope to suit) 2) Made the appropriate user directory for the department/group wishing to run a Zope instance 3) NOTE: I think this part is theoretically correct but should be run as the new user, not as root, so as not to have to chown the user files afterwards, I haven't tried this yet to see if that is right. I ran (?as root?) /usr/localZope/bin/mkzopeinstance.py to install the appropriate instance files in the new users home directory (answer and remember the appropriate login details) 3a) I then had to chown the files, but as I said, I think running mkzopeinstance.py as the right user would negate this 4) Modify etc/zope.conf to set the effective-user, database size limit and modify management ports to those that are unused for any other application (also modifying my firewall config to allow access) 5) Run bin/zopectl start - login with the appropriate credentials used in the mkzopeinstance procedure Check that everything looks to be ok 6) untar the appropriate componemts (I installed CMF and Plone) in to the users products directory Restart ZopeServer (zopectl restart) 8) Select Root, add a new Plone Site, (Remember the name you give it for use in the httpd rewrite rule below) 7) As I am running behind Apache, configure httpd.conf for the domain and add Rewrite & Proxy directives and rewrite rules to the new plone site instance. I believe this allows me to achieve, multiple instances for multiple users, each having their own ZopeServer to control, their own Plone and other component control, I can manage DB size and disk usage through zope.conf (I assigned read only rights to the users after I modified it) and bandwidth through mod_bandwidth on apache. The users have normal FTP and email access to their own local virtual machines without effecting any other services or users on the machine. I now will be trying to setup MySQL access and some other components to try out, document management etc and skins/themes is on the list the get my head around. Thanks again Russ _____ From: zope-bounces@zope.org [mailto:zope-bounces@zope.org] On Behalf Of Russell Winter Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 7:47 AM To: zope@zope.org; ozzope@lists.ozzope.org Subject: [Zope] Beginners Confusion Folks, I am trying to understand instances, any help or suggestions would be appreciated as I am obviously missing something. I would like to have each user having, either, their own Zope Server binaries (including CMF & Plone) in their home directories. Alternatively, as multiple Zope Servers on one machine will be quite a resource eater, (probably 20 main users) is it possible to have just one Zope Server and multiple instances of the database/CMF/Plone for the users? All user instances and content including the database entries would need to be accounted for in and installed in their own home directories to allow us to control and manage each user or groups bandwidth and quota's etc etc. Is this possible? If so, is there a how-to or something I have not found yet or some advice would be appreciated. I have several books on Zope now and none of them seem to describe instances or multiple user configurations in any detail. I am looking for each department/user/group to be able to manage, for the most part, their own web-services, but with us still managing the usual operating and application environments. Thanks a lot, regards, Russ