Are there any special provisions in Virtualmin to help support "parked" domain names?
From looking at the Virtualmin site (i.e. forums, support docs, etc), I realize that from the Virtualmin perspective a parked site is nothing more than a domain alias. I currently maintain a large number of parked sites for a few clients, and these sites have no content, receive no email, etc. I imagine the easiest solution would be to create a virtual site specifically for these parked sites, and then create each one as a domain alias.
However, this presents 2 problems:
(1) It appears that this may setup much more than needed for the domain. Only some basic DNS entries and an Apache alias is all I would expected is really needed for it.
(2) The domain will then appear in the drop-down list of virtual domains, and as this list grows it could make it much more difficult to navigate to the active domains that will need to be maintained.
Hence, my original question: are there any provisions in Virtualmin to help maintain such parked (and basically dormant) domains?
If not, perhaps this could be changed to a feature request?
Comments
Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 00:35 Comment #1
No, Virtualmin doesn't have any special treatment for parked domains .. the recommended way to create them is as aliases, perhaps pointing to a real virtual server that tells visitors how to purchase the domain or something.
Setup for alias domains is pretty minimal though - typically all they will have is a DNS zone and an entry in the target domain's block in httpd.conf.
There is no way to hide them from the domain list, but if you have more than 100 (by default) that list turns into a text box for just entering a domain name.
Submitted by novoops on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 11:22 Comment #2
So could we make this a feature request?
Perhaps you could add some options to control what gets put in the drop down list of domains. I suspect that it could go somewhere in Virtualmin > System Settings > Module Configuration. I would like it if we could then set "Alias Servers in Virtual Server Selection List" as:
- All (default)
- All except aliases of (with a field where we can enter a specific Virtual Server)
- None
Keeping it simple like this, hopefully would make it easier to implement. Of course, even more flexibility is always welcome ;-) If you wanted to get slicker you could allow for multiple entries in that exception list, or perhaps even a per virtual server option set via Edit Virtual Server > Related virtual servers.It would be nice to also have a related option to control if the autoalias domains are shown in the list or not (which is really the same thing as excluding aliases of that domain, but the separate option would be nice).
As far as being able to edit any alias servers which would not be selectable via the drop down list, that already appears to be quite easy. Under "Edit Virtual Server > Related virtual servers" you can already get to any of the aliases servers, which seems perfect to me. Again, if you wanted to get fancy, you could even add a Virtualmin option to the left-side menu such as "Edit Alias Servers" which would merely display a list of all the alias servers for editing.
And if any of this becomes too much for the near future, perhaps at the minimum we could get just the ability to setup a single virtual server for which aliases are not shown, which could even just be an option in the virtualmin config file.
Thanks for considering this.
Submitted by JamieCameron on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 12:14 Comment #3
That's a great idea .. I will add an option (on the Module Config page) to hide alias domains like this in the next Virtualmin release.
Submitted by novoops on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 13:08 Comment #4
That's great. Looking forward to it.
BTW, taking a quick peek at the code that builds that list and it looks relatively straight forward to implement (at least the mechanics of skipping some entries in the list). I could even see an easy way to patch just 2 files with a couple of lines to make this work for my install while waiting for the next release (I know you're going to suggest I just be patient, though :-)
Submitted by Issues on Wed, 07/15/2009 - 13:18 Comment #5
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.