I am going to buy VirtualMinPro (10 user version). I am going to use Centos 4.4
I read the FAQ and it seems to suggest I should do a very minimal OS install.
Therefore, I won't bother to install any of the following Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Bind.
My various domains don't have a private IP address, so I don't think the Centros default vsftp will work for me, but you will probably install ProFTPD Server ?
After the installation Will the http document root for the users using domains be:
/home/username ?
The documentation seemed to indicate that php 5? would be installed? (I was looking for 4.x but I can probably adapt rather than downgrade)
Scripts running on the virtualmin website domains will be using something similiar to suexec or do you use suexec?
I have been practicing installing the open source version of VirtualMin and Webmin. (cdrecord didn't work at first, but I got it to work with a simple addition of /dev/cdrom to the extra CD Record options. Maybe that will help someone.)
I almost got the open source virtual min fully working. (I think I just need to install a differnt ftp demon rather than vsftp) ;-) But I figure I'll save some time and support you guys by paying for the super installer script.
I don't mind re-installing the pro script a couple times, or tweaking the results, but I'm hoping if I get stuck I can get help, since I will have paid to use your super installer.
I am creating a test environment on a server at home behind a linksys firewall, so hopefully your defaults will work with that.
Thanks for any answers or observations you provide.
When I install Centos installation, should I have it install the quota system? Or will the VirtualMin magically take care of that too?
Hey Rick,
<i>I read the FAQ and it seems to suggest I should do a very minimal OS install.</i>
It doesn't need to be minimal, but you shouldn't go out of your way to setup virtual hosting stuff, and the less configuration of virtual hosting related software you do, the better. So, don't touch Apache, Postfix, Sendmail, vsftpd, ProFTPd, Dovecot, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. and all will turn out fine.
Just make sure your package manager (yum) is working for installing OS provided packages, and make sure you don't enable any non-OS software repositories (this is asking for trouble, because there is no solid standard on packaging guidelines and everybodies packages act a little differently).
<i>My various domains don't have a private IP address, so I don't think the Centros default vsftp will work for me, but you will probably install ProFTPD Server ?</i>
We install ProFTPd. But vsftpd can work on private addresses, too. FTP server doesn't matter much...it's such an old protocol, as long as it works and is secure, there's not much that can go wrong.
<i>Scripts running on the virtualmin website domains will be using something similiar to suexec or do you use suexec?</i>
Yes, we use suexec. For PHP we use mod_fcgid+suexec.
<i>The documentation seemed to indicate that php 5? would be installed? (I was looking for 4.x but I can probably adapt rather than downgrade)</i>
We install and support both, even simultaneously. We're freakin' geniuses that way. ;-)
<i>But I figure I'll save some time and support you guys by paying for the super installer script.</i>
Good choice. It's almost super these days. It actually works on most systems most of the time. (I wrote the install script, so it's not as nice as Webmin and Virtualmin, but it's getting a lot better in new versions.)
And, of course, we'll help you fix anything that goes awry.
<i>I am creating a test environment on a server at home behind a linksys firewall, so hopefully your defaults will work with that.</i>
Yep, lots of tools in Virtualmin for working with limited network infrastructure--turns out a lot of folks are developing behind NAT firewalls and wanted a devel environment that looked like their deployment environment, so we've developed a lot of support for that kind of thing.
The only tricky bit is that you <i>must</i> explicitly tell Virtualmin that the IP for DNS entries is not the same as the IP it picks up when it installs. This is set in the module config under "Other server settings".
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I bought the script. When I installed Centos 4 I hard coded in an IP, rather than let the new server get it via from the LinkSys router.
The script has been running for about 4 hours now! It got into the Up2date Centos Channels screen and there it sits. I see the hard disk like blinking madly.
I ran the script in a terminal window inside Gnome. I'm wondering if maybe the script does not have enough memory and I'm chugging along using virtual memory.
If I have to re-do it, maybe next time I'll start from a real console.
At any rate, I'm not worried or anything.
RC
Hey Rick,
Sounds like you didn't run up2date -u before running the script. You can check by looking at the last lines of /root/virtualmin-install.log. I bet you'll see an up2date prompt (and since the script needs up2date to run non-interactively, it'll just hang there forever). That doesn't explain the hard disk light flashing, since it wouldn't actually be doing anything.
Anyway, to see what's happening, run:
tail /root/virtualmin-install.log
If it's just waiting for someone to configure up2date, you'll need to halt the install script, run "up2date -u" to completion, and then run install.sh again.
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I did run up2date -u . It did a lot of looking, but there was nothing for it to update since I had earlier run yum update .
The interface is so sluggish, it may take 5 or 10 minutes for the screen blanker to turn off, or for a drag of a window to take effect, that I guess I can't open another terminal window and look at the log.
Should I just turn the power off and on and run the update from run level 3?
Oh well, no need to think to hard about this. I went ahead and recycled the power.
Well, that didn't work too well.
The script said that Virtualmin was already installed and ended with FATAL errors.
I looked at the log. The last thing in it was
Disabling SELinux before installing
setenforce 0 succeeded
Succeeded
And then I saw the errors for when tried to restart the script.
I will re-install centos 4, this time I won't install SELinux at all. The last time I had it running with warnings only. I don't know much about SELinux anyway.
Rick
Hey Rick,
The SELinux stuff doesn't matter.
I'd be happy to drop in on your box and straighten it out for you. Just email me the details at joe@virtualmin.com, and I'll be able to whip it into shape in no time (and maybe figure out why the install.sh failed for your box).
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Hi Joe,
There is no need to visit the box yet. After rebooting and running without the graphic interface, the script did finish and everything is installed.
But I notice that the Gnome desktop runs real slow and I saw a lot of disk churning. So I'm guessing that some of the new services that are running are maxing out my memory. (This is a test machine.)
So I rebooted, so now I'm up without the Gnome. When i connect from another PC, Webmin seems to respond rather slow and I saw some disk churn.
Memory. When I went into top, it said I had Mem: 191024K total. So, maybe I only have 256 meg of ram instead of the 512 I thought I had?
Looks like I'll have to visit the computer store.
Hey Rick,
Yeah, you definitely don't want X on a low memory box.
There are some things you can do to reduce memory usage of the Virtualmin stack (we optimize for speed at the expense of memory...but if you have low memory, it has the opposite impact because things will swap).
Here's a post covering some of the steps to reducing memory usage:
http://www.virtualmin.com/forums/message-view?message_id=104298
This isn't all that can be done (Apache, for example, is quite large by default and has a lot of room for reduction at the expense of reducing capabilities), but it's a good start.
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