Greetings, I'm a noobie to Cloudmin/Virtualmin etc. At the moment I work for a company that has an entirely custom-built hosting platform. Everything runs on CentOS and there is a centralized control panel server with a variety of nodes that include some for shared hosting, some private VM's, and some dedicated servers. At the moment things like PHP and Apache are custom compiled on each machine, and are kept up-to-date with the latest stable releases available on the PHP and Apache websites.
First Question: If we expect to have a combination of hosts with VM's, VM's with sub-users and private dedicated servers, is this what we need Cloudmin to manage? Is there somewhere I can demo this (Demo link above never works for me)
Second Question: Is there documentation on how to compile your own PHP/Apache versions? I see there's a bleeding edge repository (but only for CentOS 5). We're happy to compile our own versions but we'd need some sort of details on how the current versions are compiled so we can match this.
Thanks!
Howdy,
Yeah, Cloudmin is for managing Virtual Machines. Virtualmin is a control panel for managing shared hosting, such as websites, DNS, databases, email, and the like.
There are free versions of both of those -- Virtualmin GPL is a very functional control panel.
Cloudmin GPL works well, but it's limitation is that it only can manage Virtual Machines on one server, where Cloudmin Pro can manage Virtual Machines across any number of hosts (amongst other things).
As far as PHP/Apache are concerned -- Virtualmin goes out of it's way to use packages that are provided by the distribution vendors. So that PHP version being used by Virtualmin is just the PHP version offered by CentOS.
Apache is an exception, but the change needed there is a simple one... Virtualmin uses /home for it's document root. All the accounts and websites exist within /home.
Since the Apache version that comes with CentOS has an suexec binary compiled to use /var/www, Virtualmin distributes an Apache version where suexec is compiled to instead use /home.
I believe that's just a matter of setting the Apache "--with-suexec-docroot" compile time option to "/home".
-Eric
Hi Eric, Thanks for your response. Although we're used to compiling our own I was doing some research into yum repositories such as:
Les RPM de Remi repository - (See http://rpms.famillecollet.com/) - up to date PHP/MySQL packages
IUS Community Repo - (See http://iuscommunity.org/ - http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-docs/2009-November/003730.html )
Does anyone have experience with virtualmin working with these repositories?
Howdy,
PHP from alternate repositories can work, but can require some tweaking of the configuration in order for that to work.
Apache, though, would have trouble unless it was compiled to use /home, and only the Virtualmin repository has that.
Unless, of course, you only care to use mod_php. Using mod_php isn't secure in a multi-user environment, but if all your user are trusted, then using mod_php might work for you, and doesn't require the use of suexec.
-Eric