Where are the default A-record settings stored?

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#1 Mon, 04/09/2007 - 14:06
TonyShadwick

Where are the default A-record settings stored?

I've looked through both the Bind module for webmin, and the virtualmin module and templates...I just can't seem to find this.

On every new server I make, I have the following A records getting generated:

ftp m mail www

Although these are okay for the most part, I'd like to get rid of the "m" (don't even know why that's there...short for mail?), and in many cases these aren't actually A records, but CNAME's.

So where do I go to change it?

Mon, 04/09/2007 - 14:37
KoenRens

/var/named/domainname.hosts

In that folder /var/named you can change every individual record.
Afterwards restart bind!

I do not know how to change the template for this, because I want
*.domeinnaam A xx.xxx.xx.xxx
to work as well, but virtualmin does not include the *.domain A-record. :(

Mon, 04/09/2007 - 15:54
TonyShadwick

Yeah, I know that. :) I've managed bind from the console on FreeBSD for a little over 5 years now, going back to FreeBSD 4.2.

I need to know where to adjust it from the template, as you said.

Sun, 06/07/2009 - 07:02
Joe
Joe's picture

"m" is short for "mobile"--all our mobile nerd friends tell us it's all the rage. Mobile access and notification is a new thing we've been working on...Virtualmin can be used on almost any mobile device with a web browser now, using the virtual-server-mobile theme--it's automatically detected on most such devices, but m.hostname.tld:10000 will always choose the mobile version of the interface. This makes it possible to use the light-weight theme even on devices that claim not to be mobile (like Windows Mobile and things that run Opera Mini...both of which seem to claim to be real browsers, despite being extremely limited and usually working on very slow connections). Webmin's System and Server Status monitor can also send SMS messages through most major carriers. It's cool, and the mobile aspects of Virtualmin will get cooler in the future.

The m record is harmless, even if you never use it and think you never will, but if you want to get rid of it open up Server Templates in the System Settings menu. Select the "BIND DNS Settings" section, in the field "BIND DNS records for new domains" add all of the records you do want (you'll have to list them all, because of the next bit) using variable substitution to fill in the stuff that changes (probably ${IP} and maybe ${DOM}). Then select the "Use only the records above" option. This will use only the records you listed.

For example, you could do something like:

<i>
${DOM}. IN A ${IP}
www.${DOM}. IN A ${IP}
mail.${DOM}. IN A ${IP}
${DOM}. IN MX 5 mail.${DOM}
${DOM}. IN TXT &quot;v=spf1 a mx a:doxfer.com ip4:70.86.4.226 ?all
</i>

To keep it super simple (gettting rid of ftp. and m., since neither are strictly needed, they're just a convenience for your users). Ordinarily, you'd just add whatever extra records you wanted to add, and you wouldn't have to provide the whole lot of them...but to get rid of default ones is a wee bit trickier.

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Mon, 04/09/2007 - 22:00
TonyShadwick

I think part of the concern is that I haven't fully decided what direction to go in for webmail - whether to have it where each virtual server has it's own instance of webmail software, or simply provide one install that everyone accesses and auth's using LDAP. Not your fault, rather my own. :) I just wanted to make sure that if in fact we were going with shared webmail, then I could template it to point to a different IP.

I know webmin has built-in webmail, but by comparison to dedicated packages such as Roundcube, there's just no comparison. :)

Tue, 04/10/2007 - 02:31 (Reply to #5)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey Tony,

You don't need to get complicated, or make big decisions up-front, on webmail. As long as you don't do something crazy (like putting your users in LDAP...I'm kidding...but only a little), you can provide all sorts of options.

But, my recommendation would be to do one install of your preferred webmail client and then make an alias for all of your domains to point to it. We're kind of thinking on institutionalizing this setup in the default installation...but we can't bring ourselves to give up on people using Usermin for webmail...but nobody seems to like Usermin for webmail, so we may end up giving in and installing something else, by default.

BTW-What don't you like about Usermin webmail? (I promise you won't hurt our feelings with anything you have to say. But one of these days I'm going to beat it out of somebody. Nobody wants to tell me what they like better about SquirrelMail. Roundcube, at least, looks cool...though it's horribly under-featured at this point.)

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Tue, 04/10/2007 - 11:00
TonyShadwick

If you're looking for honesty....(you've come to the wrong place!)... :P

j/k

Um...lessee here. Usermin suffers from something that webmin and friends overall suffers from right now, which is that it's HTML output needs a serious overhaul to be css and xml compliant. A few months ago, this didn't bother me so much, and as a perl coder overall it shouldn't. Perl's job is to make things functional, not to make things pretty.

What I didn't realize up until very recently is that demarcation between functional and pretty got more strict on me - in order to make things prettier, you have to be more strict on what you're spitting out. Lemme see if I can give you an example:

Okay, you want to center an element. Simple enough, generate[center&gt;conent&lt;/center&gt;. Wrong. :

The &quot;right&quot; way to do this is[span id=&quot;useful content identifier&gt;content&lt;/span&gt;. Or use a[div&gt; set. Then in your &quot;default&quot; theme, you have a css file that has a block for &quot;useful content identifier&quot;, and you choose to center it from there. Same goes for changing from default font sizes, bold, italics, tables (tables are permittable, but a no-no in most cases it seems), etc. Spit out data and data only, don't style it at all.

Where this hurts Usermin in particular is that it winds up feeling very sluggish, and at least last I looked, it is reading the mailfiles directly, which scares the living bejesus out of me. Plus, we aren't running all of this on one box. I'm getting ready to try cloning the MySQL module and add what's required to operate a MySQL cluser, and use dbmail. That can connected via imap4s.

If you want to get people to use usermin more, it needs to be able to be on a separate box from the mail stores, and it needs to be able to be made prettier. Using the stressfree theme helps, but it still needs more help. :)

Part of what sucks about what I just said above is that changing what Webmin spits out will break most existing themes. The only thing you might do is have a &quot;theme backwards compat&quot; boolean, and when on, you spit out the old kind of html, and when not set, spit out the newer. *shrug*

Helps that I have a design firm behind me doing this kinda stuff all day too.

Tue, 04/10/2007 - 17:46 (Reply to #7)
Joe
Joe's picture

Hey Tony,

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. Now let's run through them one at a time.

<i>Um...lessee here. Usermin suffers from something that webmin and friends overall suffers from right now, which is that it's HTML output needs a serious overhaul to be css and xml compliant. A few months ago, this didn't bother me so much, and as a perl coder overall it shouldn't. Perl's job is to make things functional, not to make things pretty.

What I didn't realize up until very recently is that demarcation between functional and pretty got more strict on me - in order to make things prettier, you have to be more strict on what you're spitting out.
</i>

I agree whole-heartedly, and I've browbeaten Jamie into doing something about it. Over the next month or two everything in Webmin and Usermin will become entirely styled with CSS. The end of table-based layout in Webmin and Usermin is upon us. Once that's done, if you see a table used for anything other than an actual data table, it'll be treated like a bug. No more center tags either.

<i>Where this hurts Usermin in particular is that it winds up feeling very sluggish, and at least last I looked, it is reading the mailfiles directly, which scares the living bejesus out of me. Plus, we aren't running all of this on one box. I'm getting ready to try cloning the MySQL module and add what's required to operate a MySQL cluser, and use dbmail. That can connected via imap4s.</i>

This is entirely configurable. As of a couple of months ago we use IMAP to connect, by default, in Virtualmin Professional installations. Though I dunno why reading mail files directly is scary...you let Dovecot do it. Why not Usermin? ;-)

Don't hold the Usermin default against it. It has more flexibility in this regard than any other web-based mail client (it'll do files in all major formats, POP, and IMAP). I'd prefer to see IMAP become the default in Usermin itself...but I can only really call it for Virtualmin installations. And there, we've made the switch for all installations.

<i>If you want to get people to use usermin more, it needs to be able to be on a separate box from the mail stores, and it needs to be able to be made prettier. Using the stressfree theme helps, but it still needs more help. :)</i>

It can already be on a separate box.

Prettier is coming sooner than you think. See my blog post about it here:

http://www.obsceneart.com/blog/?p=16

How's that screenshot strike you? Getting close to RoundCube goodness? There's still some cleanups to do, and that shot still has the nasty nested tables in it, so nothing lines up right, but the basics are in place. (Note also that that theme you see has a half-dozen color schemes that'll be selectable, so if you don't like the Gnome-style warm grey shown there, you can choose Vista-style black, Aero, pastel blue, and one or two others.)

<i>Part of what sucks about what I just said above is that changing what Webmin spits out will break most existing themes. The only thing you might do is have a &quot;theme backwards compat&quot; boolean, and when on, you spit out the old kind of html, and when not set, spit out the newer. *shrug*</i>

We've been discussing this. The best theme out there is Stress Free, as you've noted, and I'm pretty sure David will be on-board with our changes. There will probably be some way to revert to old-style ui-lib functions...but I don't think any of the good themes will need to--you already have to replace so many ui-lib functions to get anything interesting (the example I show in that blog post has now had nearly every ui-lib function replaced with a CSS-based one and removes tables entirely from the layout..so it would barely be affected by a change in ui-lib since it doesn't use any of it!). And, if we have to break all old themes to get out of the rut we've been in for the past several years, UI-wise, we'll do it. Jamie wouldn't...but I would, and I can usually convince him when I put my mind to it. I'm ruthless when it comes to stupid, and tables for all layout is just stupid when we've got such great tools in CSS. ;-)

I suspect David will be ecstatic about the CSS-based version of things--and it'll mean he can drop out half or more of the functions he's had to write in his theme.pl. Having less code to maintain makes most developers happy. So, I think Stress Free will work within a few days of release of new Webmin and Usermin versions that break the theme. And, of course, once the conversion is finished (a monumental undertaking...Jamie's been working at it for weeks, to first convert all of the Webmin modules to use ui-lib exclusively for all UI elements), folks who don't know perl at all, but are wicked good at CSS and design will be able to make themes and actually customize everything without writing any perl code.

<i>Helps that I have a design firm behind me doing this kinda stuff all day too.</i>

Hehehe...You'll have to jump into the fray when we have a theme contest after the conversion to CSS-based layout is complete. There'll be cash prizes, fame, fortune and pretty girls. (OK, maybe just cash prizes and a few kudos from your fellow Webmin, Usermin and Virtualmin users. But still it'll be cool.)

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Tue, 04/10/2007 - 18:18
TonyShadwick

It's certainly getting there, I'll give you that. My first encounter with Usermin was back in 2002, and to be fair most of my opinions on it formed back then, which is that it was a web interface for the unix-savvy when they didn't have shell access. Mail reading was there, but most advanced features were either missing, or required advanced knowledge to utilize.

So if Usermin matures the way you describe, I'd certainly kick my 2 cents in to contribute. As I've mentioned above, I'm trying to get everyone moved into LDAP, and things like SpamAssassin will read user_prefs from LDAP, which means I can have all of my mail servers point to my LDAP cluster and settings will follow them around. I also am setting up AFS for home directories, and I have a base kerberos install going for single-sign-on.

I notice you guys don't have support for multiple apache servers via webmin yet, so I may have to poke me head in there and hack a bit a that too. Probably use passwordless ssh to do start and stop commands, and look to see if the return code is zero or one for each server, then use shared storage to sync up configs. Using the Webmin API would be better, but that came along after I read up on Webmin's config, so I don't know how the remote API functions, and I'm not going to have time to do a full module overhaul, so for now a hack will have to do. :P

Wow I get long-winded. If you guys are looking for dev help let me know, pay or free, depending on what it is. I honestly don't know how many perl coders you have stumble around here and help out. :)

Wed, 04/11/2007 - 02:53
matti

At least I would need good language support for Finnish and that the biggest problem for me. I personally don't like Squirrel though I do use it for now (because everyone else use it). Also I want to brand my webmail client with our own logo. I don't know how easily that is done in usermin.

Also I must add that it's really hard to teach users to use port postfix (:20000). That goes to webmin too. I would very much more like to see admin access something like domain.tld/admin or admin.domain.tld but I don't really want to have admin named directory under public_html. Because ordinary people have never seen port extensions, it's hard for them to use it. Though the biggest reason for my clients not to use webmin or usermin is lack of language support. That's why we use webmin only as admin control panel.

Also I must admit that usermin looked horrible the last time I saw it so it doesn't have very good reputation.

Wed, 04/11/2007 - 09:56
TonyShadwick

That last part is really easy to accomodate, and in fact I do it already.

Go into the webmin configuration, turn on ssl if you're using it, then go into to IP and Port settings, choose an IP (or all if you prefer), then set it to be port 80 or 443, depending up whether you're using SSL or not.

If you're behind a firewall, then simply NAT 80 or 443 to port 10000 or 20000 as you see fit.

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