Webmin/Virtualmin/Usermin lack of documentation

Howdy,

Sure, we're always looking to improve the documentation, both here on the website and the help text within Virtualmin itself.

Is there something in particular you'd like to see more information on?

We're not particularly fond of the forums either, Joe is working on that with the new site upgrade that's coming down the road.

I'm sorry that you feel it would be "business suicide" to run Virtualmin on a production server... there are many thousands of people out there who would disagree with that sentiment :-)

While support isn't 24/7, we do our best to respond quickly to support requests. We're not trying to hide the fact that there's only three of us.

We do our best to help with any and all issues that arrive, and one of the most common comments we receive are positive remarks about the support we provide. It's important to us to offer great support.

However, depending on the time of day it's asked, some issues may have to wait until the next day... we may not be able to answer issues at 2am, though it's not uncommon for one of us to be up and responding to them at that hour :-)

Lastly, if you haven't seen it yet, you may want to take a peek at the Authentic Theme, which is now included in Webmin/Virtualmin by default. It's not the default theme, you'd have to switch to it, but we feel it's a huge improvement over the existing one.

-Eric

although at the moment I am not looking for commercial solution for business, I am rather trying to build out mu own home server for personal use. but the idea is for me to learn and maybe translate what I learn into business solution for my office.

my experiences so far is not too good. when I was playing with Xen/XenServer I could find any and all info I needed to setup and configure the server from ground up. yes, it took a while. yes took lots of reading and googling , and searching. BUT the information was there, and lots of it was on Xen/XenServer WiKi and forums. here, except for WebMin, and even though the information is there it is all over the place, I can not find anything I need want to have a successful setup. not even the basic info on what each product does and how it doing it. Specifically CloudMin package.

first of all your naming of the products is too confusing without explanation, and even the explanation for what the product does is choppy and full of IT jargon that adds to the confusion. for example, in my specific case I was/am tring to figure out exactly what I need to use to setup my own home lab VM/File server. my needs are small 4-5 VMs running set of apps like coach potato, subnzb and a like(not even constantly as I only want to update my media collection for a better quality feeds since my DVD are not too good) and also run a pfSense or Sophos UTM, a Plex server and one or two windows P2V converted machines for work needs. my requirements for the system is simple, I want a BTRFS support for HOST system so I can create 2 or 3 BTRFS raid pools on the main host and share that via NFS/SAMBA to my network andmy VMs AND a GUI management with remote capabilities , preferably web-based (this is where you guys come in ).

I have been trying for weeks to get information on what should I use a VirtualMin OR CloudMin for my setup. no info anywhere or the info provided is so confusing I can make an inform decision. every time I search for cloudmin I get a VirtualMin page. almost every howto link on your site(with few exceptions) I find drops me to virtualmin help page. terminology is confusing at best, if you try to make sense of it is is comes out like " you host your host on the host and configure your host to host the host " or "you host the VPS on the host but you configure your VPS to host your guests" can I say HUUUUHHHH????? I understand that your products mostly target the big data center like setups and cloud hosted infrastructures, but they can also be helpful for smaller setups and the whole idea of providing free version is so some one could use it for his own needs, learn it, and suggest and provide the expertise, to others and to business setups to buy-in.

I have used your WebMin product many times and I can truly see the benefits of it and can honestly recommend it to any one looking for a reasonable GUI solution for a headless server. even though many "TRUE" sysadmins would lough at me saying that CLI is the ONLY way to admin, I know that not to be true for many of us out there. but I have been trying to build out my server with cloudmin for the last 2 weeks and no matter what I try it will not work, and I can not/ did not find any thing useful on the web or on your site and forum. the more I search the more confused I get.

you need a better site structure, you need a better product division and identification. you need a better product definition and description of what exactly each product does ,well webmin have been around for a while and many people know what it does and how but VirtualMin and Cloudmin is kind of mashed together into a lump and not identified distinctly enough by features and capabilities. you also need to have a better description of things with simpler language targeting people who might not be in the big DataCenter crowd but still technically well versed to setup a small server for personal or business use and would like to use your product for that.

thanks

This is all great feedback, and we certainly welcome it. Some of it we are quite aware of, and I'm working on an update to the website right now that fixes (or begins to fix) a significant number of the problems you've mentioned. It's slow-going, but I have finally overcome the biggest hurdle a couple of days ago when I finally figured out how to migrate the Drupal project_issue issue tracker data into the new version.

So, here's what's up and what we're doing to correct some of your complaints:

1. Webmin wiki has been completely overhauled a couple of months ago and is under very active development, with a few awesome volunteers and me working on it. It was migrated from an old and broken TWiki installation to a new and nicely functioning MediaWiki installation. This is a combination of Jamie's Webmin book and my Webmin book (both of which were published commercially about a decade ago), with some updates over the years to reflect changes in Webmin. I work on it about once a week, adding new stuff, cleaning up old stuff, etc. It is roughly 1,000 printed pages worth of documentation; so, if you're not finding Webmin well-documented (it doesn't cover Virtualmin or Cloudmin, however), I'm not sure what else we can do...please help! Check it out, and help make it better: http://doxfer.webmin.com
2. New website on a new server. I installed a new server in our colo ages ago, and began working on migrating to Drupal 7 (from the current Drupal 6 site). This has been very slow-going, as I'm not a Drupal or PHP expert, but it's now very near completion. The new design is much cleaner, and I'm trying to cover some of the issues with confusion over naming (i.e. "Virtualmin" is not for virtual machines, but for virtual hosting, and Cloudmin is for virtual machine management, which is an accident of history that we can't fix now and it does confuse a lot of people). The new server is bigger/faster and has SSD storage, so performance problems should become a thing of the past, as well, and I think it is difficult to overestimate how much the slowness of the site has impacted out ability to keep it up to date. When I dread editing docs because it is super slow, things don't get updated as often. The layout of the site will change, and Cloudmin and Virtualmin will get more dedicated sections, so it is more clear what the products do. I plan to do an overhaul of the Webmin.com site for Webmin and Usermin as soon as I finish the Virtualmin.com migration and overhaul, as it is also relatively weak at explaining what the projects are good for; many folks find the various *min projects confusing, particularly if they are coming from cPanel/WHM, where the divisions are very different. These functions are separated in Virtualmin; both types of administration are provided by one thing (Virtualmin, which you get to by logging into Webmin). Some folks seem to think Usermin plays the role of cPanel and Webmin is like WHM, but that's not at all the case, so we need to be more clear about these projects and their roles. Cloudmin vs. Virtualmin is also a source of constant confusion. We know it, and I'm working on it.
3. On the theme upgrade question, that one is tough. We can't stick with what we have now. It is the single biggest source of complaints about Virtualmin. It has to change. Authentic is the best option we have for how to change it (and, frankly, I love it...with a few caveats, that I've been working with Ilia on changing, like icons have come back in some places). We do plan to continue to maintain the existing theme until Webmin 2.0, at which point the API will change and old themes won't work, but Authentic and my bootstrap theme will be updated to work with the new API. The old theme simply wont be plausible to update. So, I think on this front, we need to get Authentic right, or configurable in such a way that it is right enough to make everybody willing to switch.
4. Documentation within the projects themselves. I'm planning to do another online help audit and update. A couple of times in the life of Virtualmin, I've gone through and made sure every option had online help, so clicking on the option would pop up a short help file about it. That hasn't happened in a few years now, and there are a lot of common options and pages that don't have help, particularly in new modules like nginx. So, I'll be doing another audit and checking in updates to make sure our online help is back to being mostly comprehensive. This could also happen for Webmin. Short term, I plan to make searching docs in Webmin better, by making sure it prioritizes results from the Webmin wiki. And longer term, there may be a way to automate importing the docs from the wiki into online help files for Webmin.

As an aside, I would also like to go back to a wiki-based documentation section of the site. Our previous website used a dokuwiki which was connected to the site somewhat transparently, but was kinda clumsy with regard to syncing users and data and such and was not very seamless. When I moved to Drupal I wanted everything to be within Drupal. So we moved into a Drupal ticket tracker (which has been mostly kinda clumsy and annoying, but does work, and doesn't have as many quirks with integration that the old site had), and moved the docs from the wiki into a series of Drupal Book Pages. Those kinda suck, and we don't have an easy/safe way to allow anyone to edit them. I've been tinkering with more wiki-like features in the new site. Given that I'm in a hurry to launch the new site, for a variety of reasons, I may not entirely have wiki-fied the docs when it first launches, but it is on my radar as something I'd like to happen. In the short term, there will be some new docs, some new organizational sections to make it more clear what each project is for, and how to make use of it. Our front page and Support pages will also see a total overhaul, to make it easier for folks to find the right place to start.

In other news, I'm moving everything except Virtualmin core into separate and public github repositories in the next few days. All of the Virtualmin plugins are Open Source, so I want to make sure folks can find and see and contribute to the code, easily. For historic reasons they're all in the same repo, which is private (because it contains the Virtualmin Professional code). But, there's no reason for any of that other stuff to be private or inaccessible to developers that want to extend Virtualmin. So, that's coming, too.

As Eric noted, we are three guys (or four, if you count Ilia, as he is now on the payroll for a small monthly payment to encourage him to keep working on Authentic, but he doesn't do any support or other work; UI is his only task). We're trying our best. Sometimes, it's not good enough and we go back to the drawing board and try again. The new website is one of those "back to the drawing board" situations. We've been at that particular drawing board three times before (OpenACS, Joomla, Drupal 6, and now Drupal 7...and Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has actually proven to be the hardest migration of them all, surprisingly enough). Maybe one of these days it'll come out the way we want.

Meanwhile on the rest of the internet: People are writing on various websites howtos that step by step explain functionality of VirtualMin. Maybe it's an idea to ask those various authors if you can copy/adjust/integrate or just link those topics. Just Google on "Virtualmin (any feature)".

And yes, Authentic Theme is the best thing that ever happened to Webmin/Virtualmin. Maybe now make it default for the GPL package? Although it's just two or three clicks from the GPL installation to the new theme appearing.

What was said about CloudMin is valid and today still an issue. I don't know why I would need Cloudmin, even though I run 1 Virtualmin Pro and 2 AWS EC2 instances with Virtualmin GPL. AWS EC2 instances are really Cloud servers with an actual API for everything, maybe in time put some more AWS functionality besides S3 backup in Virtualmin? And I would really like the option to use my Amazon S3 as backup location for the webmin configuration and for the (partial) filesystem backups as well.

What I strongly dislike, is that subdomains count towards your license limit. That way 10 virtual hosts isn't very much. But I will keep on paying it for now and combine with GPL versions until I actually earn money on my educated hobby. For as it is, I can't afford more for it - besides the server costs.

Last minor suggestion: Take a look at Webmin Configuration in Windows10/Edge with Authentic theme. All the icons are dancing around/switching places OnMouseOver(); Luckily Firefox and Chrome don't have this issue so it's not a very urgent issue.

Hi Guys, folks from virtualmin did updated docs and there is now everything - at least I found there what I need it.