Understanding Virtualmin/Webmin as compared to other control panels??? Help Please!

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#1 Thu, 03/18/2010 - 07:28
BIG MIKE

Understanding Virtualmin/Webmin as compared to other control panels??? Help Please!

I've got Virtualmin installed and everything is running great. I've read the tutorials and some of these forums, but I can't seem to understand the operations of system. Let me give an example to explain myself more clearly:

Most Control Panels I've used have admin,reseller, and client formats. The admin can control any aspect of the system from the servers all the way down to the client. The reseller can be created by the admin, and can be allowed to create clients, and have control over all aspects of the client system. The client has control over his/her domain only. Which includes, creating databases, managing email, cron jobs, spam filtering, etc.... you get the idea.

My question is how is the setup of Virtualmin/Webmin correlate to other control panels I've used?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 08:51
andreychek

My question is how is the setup of Virtualmin/Webmin correlate to other control panels I've used?

It should be pretty similar in that regard :-)

Virtualmin Pro supports the three user types you mentioned, admins, resellers, and users.

Virtualmin GPL doesn't provide resellers, but does contain a large amount of the features otherwise available in the Pro version.

You can see a comparison here:

http://www.virtualmin.com/os-support.html

Are there any specific areas that aren't quite making sense?

-Eric

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 09:05 (Reply to #2)
BIG MIKE

well, I've managed to set-up a virtual server under my domain. However, this domain is the same as my FQDN and doesn't work. But I created another virtual server for another domain I have, and it works as expected. I would like to be able to add accounts under my primary domain, but this doesn't seem possible at the moment, or should every domain have it's own virtual server? I know I'm doing something wrong. Plus I can't send or receive mail (error: delivery temporarily suspended: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=h191 type=A: Host not found, try again).

Any suggestions?

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 09:26
BIG MIKE

I found the problem with my email and the problem with the fqdn. my /etc/hosts was not set up correctly.

Back to the other problem:

Let's say I install virtualmin. My hosting company is www.hostingexample.com. Www.hostingexample.com should have a home page to order hosting, etc. So I set up a virtualserver for my hosting company(www.hostingexample.com). Now any new domains that order, I would create them as a sub-server of www.hostingexample.com. Is This Correct? If this is correct, how to I manage permissions for the sub-servers, etc. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for the help.

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 09:35
andreychek

Howdy,

Out of curiosity, is your systems FQDN in the format "hostname.domain.tld"?

As far as your question goes --

So I set up a virtualserver for my hosting company(www.hostingexample.com)

Well, perhaps this is what you meant, I'm not sure... but in that case, I'd be creating a Virtual Server named "hostingexample.com" (without the 'www') -- which would automatically handle creating a 'www' alias for you.

Now any new domains that order, I would create them as a sub-server of www.hostingexample.com

If you, as the admin, want a new domain that only you control, then yes, I might add them as a Sub-Server of hostingexample.com.

However, if you're selling a domain to a customer, what I would do is create a new top-level domain. Choose Create Virtual Server, and make a top-level Virtual Server for that user, giving them the permissions you wish for them to have.

Then, when they log in as the admin user created during that process, they'd only have rights to that particular Virtual Server.

You, as the Master Admin, have the ability to see all domains and all features. The user you create for your customer can only administer the one domain.

-Eric

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 09:59 (Reply to #5)
BIG MIKE

Thanks for the explanation. I'm beginning to see the light.

and yes my FQDN is set-up as h191.xample.com

everything is working great.

So what your saying is if I had 50 domain sign-ups, I'd have 50 virtual-servers as well. Correct?

My next question is...And I appreciate your patience... There are some features under Virtualmin that I would not want customers to have. Where can I change this for virtualmin. I think I found where I can set the Webmin and Usermin permissions, but the Virtualmin permissions seem to be missing, or I'm missing(LOL) something. ? Thanks.

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 10:19
andreychek

So what your saying is if I had 50 domain sign-ups, I'd have 50 virtual-servers as well. Correct?

Yup, if you have 50 different users, they'd typically each have their own top-level Virtual Server.

As far as disabling services, I'd poke around in a few different places --

  • Disable any global features you don't want them seeing in System Settings -> Features and Plugins

  • Modify your Account Plans in System Settings -> Account Plans. You can use that to define limits to what your users can do (such as limiting email accounts to, say, 10 emails per Virtual Server), as well as setting what features uses have access to.

  • Modify your Server Templates in System Settings -> Server Templates. You'll want to look at all of them, but in particular, "Administrators Webmin Modules" defines what Webmin modules your users will see.

    -Eric

Thu, 03/18/2010 - 11:23
BIG MIKE

Thanks for all the help. Virtualmin/Webmin is awesome. I've tried about 8 different control panels for linux, and all of them had problems; either they wouldn't install correctly, or some of the features were incomplete and would cause errors. Keep it up you guys. You got a good thing going here.

Tue, 08/03/2010 - 11:35
andrewrimmer

So if I wanted many domains under one user. Is that possible?

Tue, 08/03/2010 - 21:09 (Reply to #9)
andreychek

Yup! You can have as many domains as you like under one user.

What you'd do is when you go to create a Virtual Server, make sure you select a "Sub-Server". That will cause the new domain to be under the control of an existing user.

-Eric

Wed, 08/04/2010 - 07:03
andrewrimmer

Thanks

That's exactly what I needed. ;)

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