FreeBSD & Virtualmin - best solution ever ;o)

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#1 Thu, 07/17/2008 - 00:13
David.Strejc

FreeBSD & Virtualmin - best solution ever ;o)

I am long years FreeBSD user and I love this system. I am happy that you move it into B support OS category. I have noticed all of limitations you have discovered in FreeBSD and Virtualmin. I have repaired 16 characters username lenght problem by modifying two src files and rebuilding world but still getting problem when usernames are longer than 32 characters (not with username itself - it seems that it resides in PAM because I can su to user with name longer than 32 characters - but I can not remote login to this account).

I'll be really happy if I can help you with install script for FreeBSD to automatise installation process - if you only can send me or point me at right file (if you have other than file you use for install on other systems). I can code rebuilding world and kernel for usinq quotas and other things I've discovered myself for FreeBSD being in class A system.

Thanks for great work on Virtualmin and Webmin (I use it for about 5 years - thanks to it I've learned UNIX).

Fri, 07/18/2008 - 17:19
Joe
Joe's picture

Awesome. We're happy to hear it's useful (and fun!) for you.

We'd be happy to have some help on the FreeBSD front, as I'm definitely an amateur.

I'm actually in the midst of rewriting the install script in Perl, so it can be a lot smarter about errors--right now if install.sh fails for any reason, it pretty much has to stop. I started working on making it handle errors by logging them and moving on, but it just got way too complicated. I also found that all of the good stuff I wanted to do would be much harder in POSIX shell (which is required for FreeBSD and Ubuntu support) than in BASH. And, of course, Perl will make it even easier.

The install script is identical between Linux and FreeBSD and between GPL and Professional versions, so the script found here: http://software.virtualmin.com/gpl/scripts/install.sh

But, that's the shell version, and will be scrapped pretty soon...another couple of weeks for the Perl version to be released, probably, though I have to do a lot of testing even once I've actually written the code. ;-)

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Sun, 07/20/2008 - 23:15 (Reply to #2)
David.Strejc

OK if you only can left your work on FreeBSD scripts so I can handel that. I am much better in writing code in ZSH than in PERL - so I'll take look at it. Again - I've never seen "The right way of doing things right - parsing config files and so on ;o)" and I would like to take part of this work for FreeBSD which I like so much. In one week I'll try to write install.sh for FreeBSD. Thanks.

Thnaks a lot.

Mon, 07/21/2008 - 10:48 (Reply to #3)
Joe
Joe's picture

<div class='quote'>In one week I'll try to write install.sh for FreeBSD.</div>

Note that it already supports FreeBSD! It's not as robust on FreeBSD because we can't count on predictable behavior from pkg_add and the ports commands--they sometimes report failures when there was none, and sometimes report success when the install failed. This is a problem we'd like to fix...but it probably requires the FreeBSD folks to actually fix their package management tools to work reliably.

And, of course, we don't touch the kernel--so long usernames are not supported out of the box. It'd probably be nice to add an optional flag to the installation process that makes it possible for a user to do that rebuild.

A couple of other issues:

I've been unable to figure out if it's possible to &quot;remount&quot; a filesystem that is in use, in order to enable quotas. On Linux, under most circumstances, the remount flag can be passed to mount and it'll mount with quotas without any trouble--even if the filesystem to be mounted is the / mount point. If this is possible on FreeBSD that'd be nice.

I've also been unable to find a way to get reasonable secondary groups support on FreeBSD, so permissions have to be looser on FreeBSD than on our Linux platforms (homes get 751 instead of 750). This is a pretty annoying problem, but I doubt it's as easy to change as the username length.

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Mon, 07/28/2008 - 04:08 (Reply to #4)
David.Strejc

;o) - note that FBSD users aren't that kind who type pkg_add ;o)))
It is sad but we type cd /usr/ports/$whatIwant &amp;&amp; make install ;o) I don't know why but FreeBSD users (as I know some of them) always uses ports tree and make install command - so everything is compiled from source. And I've never encountered misstake (like you said 0 || 1). I'll test remounting filesystem - but I think it is same as in Linux. But I think that / filesystem can be problem - I'll try it and let you know. About secondary groups I'll make some investigation. But - I hope that one day I'll have &quot;safe&quot; system. Now I can say that my apache with its mods like mod_evasive2 and mod_security2 and so on (as I've been cracked one time and I hate it and spent many hours to solve this problem) is counteable as &quot;secure&quot; - one problem still preserves. Sorry I'll write about this thing into other topic ;o) I now have some ides ;o) so it goes into Blue Skyes.

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