Installing A Multiserver Setup With Dedicated Web, Email, DNS And MySQL Database Servers On Debian 5.0 With ISPConfig 3

com>
Last edited 08/10/2010

This tutorial describes the installation of an ISPConfig 3 multiserver setup with dedicated web, email, database and two DNS servers all managed trough a single ISPConfig 3 control panel. The setup described below uses five servers and can be extended easily to to a higher number of servers by just adding more servers. E.g. if you want to have two mailservers, do the setup steps from chapter 2 on both of these servers. If you want to set up more web servers, then install ISPConfig on all other web servers in expert mode except of the first one.

 

1 Installing The Five Debian Base Systems

In this setup there will be one master server (which runs the web server and ISPConfig control panel interface) and four slave servers for database, email and DNS.

To install the clustered setup, we need five servers (or virtual servers) with a Debian 5.0 minimal install. The base setup is described in the following tutorial in the steps 1 - 6:

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-debian-lenny-ispconfig3

Install only steps 1 - 6 of the perfect server tutorial and not the other steps as they differ for a clustered setup!

In my example I use the following hostnames and IP addresses for the five servers:

Web Server

Hostname: web.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.105

Mail Server

Hostname: mail.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.106

DB Server

Hostname: db.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.107

DNS Server (primary)

Hostname: ns1.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.108

DNS Server (secondary)

Hostname: ns2.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.109

Whereever these hostnames or IP addresses occur in the next installation steps you will have to change them to match the IP's and hostnames of your servers.

 

2 Installing The Web Server

Edit the hosts file and add the IP addresses and hostnames for all servers. The hostnames and IP addresses have to be adjusted to match your setup.

vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost192.168.0.105 web.example.tld192.168.0.106 mail.example.tld192.168.0.107 db.example.tld192.168.0.108 ns1.example.tld192.168.0.109 ns2.example.tld # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopbackfe00::0 ip6-localnetff00::0 ip6-mcastprefixff02::1 ip6-allnodesff02::2 ip6-allroutersff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Set the hostname of the server:

echo web.example.tld > /etc/hostname
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

Edit the sources.list file...

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

... and ensure that it contains the following line to enable the volatile repository.

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

Run...

apt-get update

... to update the apt package database; then run...

apt-get upgrade

... to install the latest updates (if there are any).

It is a good idea to synchronize the system clock with an NTP (network time protocol) server over the Internet. Simply run...

apt-get -y install ntp ntpdate

... and your system time will always be in sync.

Install the MySQL server. A MySQL server instance is necessary on every server as ISPConfig uses it to sync the configuration between the servers.

apt-get -y install mysql-client mysql-server

Enter the new password for MySQL when requested by the installer.

We want MySQL to listen on all interfaces on the master server, not just localhost, therefore we edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and comment out the line bind-address