FreeBSD Support

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#1 Tue, 05/01/2007 - 03:54
baraboom

FreeBSD Support

Hi all -

I've been running Webmin, Usermin and Virtualmin on my FreeBSD 4.10 servers (one still at 4.7). If it ain't broke, don't fix it which is why I haven't been compelled to upgrade to 5 or 6. - there are a few features such as disk quotas that don't work but as long as you know FreeBSD decently enough, everything works fine.

I'm interested in buying in to the 250 domain price at $199 for Pro, but I'm wondering if the Early Adopter period will expire before BSD compatibility is built in - if so, I don't think that is fair and you might be losing a lot of potential customers that swear by FreeBSD. I would also request that backwards compatibility be built in for 4.X and 5.X... if it means I have to upgrade my entire system to 6.X just to run webmin, I probably will not buy it.. I also couldn't figure out which of the packages, if any, I should DL in the meantime, or if Virtualmin Pro is simply impossible to install on FreeBSD at this point...

I've searched a bit but haven't found the most timely responses, but I do apologize if any of these questions are redundant -

Sun, 09/18/2005 - 10:44
Joe
Joe's picture

Hi Daniel,

FreeBSD is not yet supported, but will be by the time of the Early Adopter 2 release (I hope, anyway).

For the full list of the currently supported Operating Systems (which are listed in the Styles field of the shopping cart, as you noticed), and various caveats about the Early Adopter 1 release, see the[a href="http://www.virtualmin.com/support/documentation/EA1-Release-Notes/"... notes</a>.

The Early Adopter 2 release is planned for sometime this coming week--though it may take another weekend to wrap it up fully. We're aiming for a release about once a week until all major bugs and deficiencies in the installer have been resolved and all planned operating systems are available. A week or so after those two things become true, the Early Adopter period will end and we'll begin working on major new features. We plan for that to happen by October 11th, but it might slide a few days.

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Sun, 09/18/2005 - 11:40
baraboom

thanks for the quick reply ;)

-boom

Fri, 09/23/2005 - 03:01
EricR

Would be excellent to see a FreeBSD release. How would updates be handled, from the ports tree? (if so, it sure is nice using portupgrade to update everything at once!)

Fri, 09/23/2005 - 18:27 (Reply to #4)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hi Eric,

Yes. When possible we will use the system standard update mechanism.

I haven't yet decided whether we would be able to do that on FreeBSD. Perhaps you can enlighten me?

Here are my concerns:

If we inject modified makefiles into the ports directory, will they Just Work? Or do we need to do something else?

If the user upgrades their actual ports tree...won't we get overwritten? (Specifically, things that have ports already, like Apache.)

Do you have any pointers for documentation on providing third party software via ports?

Thanks!

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Mon, 09/26/2005 - 18:19
LauchlinWilkinson

Gagging for Ubuntu/Debian support. The reseller option is something I have been wanting in Virtualmin for a while now. Would be buying multiple licenses today otherwise.

Mon, 09/26/2005 - 18:31 (Reply to #6)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey Lauchlin,

Debian support is very high on our list of "to be supported" systems. I was working on it some this weekend, and have just downloaded the Ubuntu ISO and so will be tackling them both simultaneously. I probably won't be able to finish it in time for EA2, which is coming on Wednesday (I think), but it will definitely make EA3 which will come next week. To bring it back to FreeBSD, I expect it will also make it into EA3. After that, we'll just be killing bugs before calling it Stable and ready for official release. All Operating System users will get at least a week of Early Adopter pricing before it goes up to retail price--so whatever your OS choice, you'll get the chance to be a guinea pig (and get Virtualmin Professional for half price). I had some folks asking about that, so I thought I'd make it public here. ;-)

So, in short:

EA2 will be released Wednesday and add:
SuSE
Mandrake/Mandriva
PHP4/PHP5 with per-domain/per-script switching
scponly restricted shell
Many bugfixes
Smoother upgrades for Virtualmin GPL users (but still not perfect)
Horde/IMP and a couple of other alternate webmail scripts

EA3 will be released in about 1.5 weeks and add:
Debian
Ubuntu
FreeBSD
Bugfixes
And other bits TBD

EA4 will be released in mid-October and will be a feature-frozen release that will exist for about a week while we close any remaining bugs.

Official release will come when it is ready. Probably a week or two after EA4.

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Tue, 10/04/2005 - 19:58 (Reply to #7)
RonCooper

Any updates on this?

I would like to purchase as an early adopter but I need to see traction on either Gentoo, Ubuntu, or Debian to pull the trigger.

Thanks,

Ron

Thu, 10/06/2005 - 02:23 (Reply to #8)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hi Ron,

It's funny to be talking to a Ron Cooper. My dad is also a Ron Cooper, and my full name is Ronald Joseph Cooper. Small world. ;-)

I'm afraid I have to admit to being a little behind on the Early Adopter release schedule I posted here. The good news is that I have gotten some traction (to borrow your phrase) on the SuSE and Mandrake EA2 release and expect to wrap it up in a day or so. After that, it will be a full-on Debian/Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and Gentoo mission. There will definitely, no ifs-ands-or-buts about it, be a release for all of those systems. I am, however, hesitant to put a specific timeframe on it or encourage you to buy before it is ready. These things take time, and sometimes it amazes even me just how long it takes--the process is quite laborious for each new system, as it is surprisingly difficult to build and maintain a build farm and management tools for all of these systems.

As you may have noted in previous posts, I'm being a bit ornery in insisting on using native packages whenever it is even remotely possible to do so, because our customers have spoken loudly about this being a gigantic flaw in cPanel and Plesk. This makes things pretty complicated, and it's without doubt the most complicated aspect of how I'm implementing the installation system. But, hopefully, maintenance will be eased by using good packages for all platforms (and using the ones supplied by the vendor possibly with changes whenever possible). And, more importantly, our customers won't have to suffer through weird "it works fine on my OS before I install the virtual hosting system, but not after".

Oh, yes, to answer your prior question: You will always be able to download the latest version of the script from your Virtualmin.com account. There is no OS dependency within the script (the selection at purchase is to gather data about our users usage patterns, and also as a last reminder to users of what the supported systems are right now--we don't want anyone to accidentally buy something they can't use yet). So, when I upgrade the script and package repository to include support for Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu, you'll be able to download the latest version and install on your preferred OS, regardless of whether you selected RHEL or CentOS or Fedora at time of purchase. (But I hope everyone will be generally truthful about where they will be installing in that little point-of-purchase poll...we really need to know these numbers.)

Hope this helps with your plans.

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Wed, 09/28/2005 - 14:56
RonCooper

I apologize if my excitement overtook my reading skills, but I stumbled on the Virtualmin Pro release today and I am totally impressed. This is the perfect fit for what I have been searching for, for a while now. I currently use Plesk and have been looking for a replacement.

Back to this thread... Kudos to you for making a Debian and Ubuntu release available so quickly. Makes this a perfect fit for me. I'm sure you would close the loop one more notch by offering up Gentoo as well.

I'm ready to buy, but if I buy right now and select a CentOS or Fedora option to play with until EA2 or EA3 brings the release I really want - will my license be transferrable?

Thanks for what looks to be a great product.

Ron

Thu, 12/15/2005 - 19:15
TravisFunkhouser

Just wanted to throw out a metoo on that. I've got a freebsd6 amd64 server just itching to get virtualmin working on it. I'd buy the license and the install :)

Any idea what timeframe we're looking at?

Thanks!

Travis

Thu, 01/26/2006 - 06:05
SteveAcup

Just touching this topic again. Would love to use the product on FreeBSD.

Tue, 05/08/2007 - 02:42
Joe
Joe's picture

Howdy Raji,

The Early Adopter pricing will not expire before FreeBSD'ers get the chance to buy in. I promise!

FreeBSD support will be probably be limited to 5 and 6, but if it proves reasonably easy (unlikely, given past OS version issues) I might give a go to adding 4 to the list.

FreeBSD is not impossible to install on--if you've been able to install Virtualmin GPL in the past, you'll be able to install Professional (the majority of the software is still Webmin modules written in pure perl, and they don't lose any of the platform support of Virtualmin GPL and Webmin). But it's not nearly as easy as for the supported systems. You have to rebuild Apache yourself (for suexec docroot in /home), as well as install all of the dependencies, configure Postfix and Dovecot and Procmail, and finally install Webmin and the modules.

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