A guide for Virtualmin Reseller account holders. Documents domain creation, editing, maintenance, and script installation.
IntroductionVirtualmin, combined with Webmin and Usermin, provides a complete virtual hosting administration system, allowing for four tiers of operation, "administrator", "reseller", "domain owner", "mail user". This guide is for the second, or reseller, tier of the system. The reseller account type has the ability to create, update and delete domains, manage email addresses within the domains under her control, and optionally install scripts and monitor bandwidth and disk usage. This guide covers only Virtualmin's extensive virtual hosting features that are available to Reseller account holders.
Navigating VirtualminAny web browser can be used with Virtualmin, though some themes use advanced browser features that work better in browsers with good CSS support (Firefox, Safari, Opera and Konqueror all fit this description, while Internet Explorer currently does not). It is even possible to use a text-mode browser like lynx or links to use Virtualmin.
To login to Webmin (because Virtualmin is part of Webmin, one logs into Webmin and browses to the Virtualmin module), browse to the address of your server using the HTTPS protocol on port 10000. For example, if your Virtualmin server was running on hostname hosting1.virtualmin.com, you would enter https://hosting1.virtualmin.com:10000 in the URL field of your browser.
Your administrator will provide you a username and password to use for logging in.
Online Help
Within most Webmin modules, there will be a help link in the upper left corner of the page. Clicking it will open a help window with documentation about the specific page you are on. Most options in Webmin can be clicked on to get a popup help window describing that specific option. The Virtualmin module has extensive online help in addition to this manual, so if any option or feature confuses you, you don't have to find the appropriate section in this guide. Clicking on it will popup the help window with help specific to the item you clicked.
Logging Out
At the bottom of the left-hand menu, you'll find a Logout link. Clicking this link will, obviously, log you out of Webmin.
To create a new virtual server, click the Create Server* menu heading in the left menu bar, and then click the *Create Virtual Server item.
A new page full of options will be displayed in the right content window. We'll assume that most default settings are appropriate for our domain for the sake of simplicity in this example, but later on we'll dive into the depths of custom Server Templates, skeleton directories and customization of the default settings for new domains. After a fresh install, Virtualmin has pretty reasonable defaults for the vast majority of environments, though, so we can create a domain easily and expect it to be useful right away.
image:images/first-domain.png["Screenshot of Virtualmin Create Domain page"]
In the above, I have filled in everything that is needed to create a domain with most features enabled. I only specified a few options: Domain name, Description, Contact email address, and Administration password. The rest I've left at their default values. If you aren't sure what a particular option means, click on the name of the option, and a help window will pop up to describe the option. Every option in Virtualmin has a popup help link, and most pages have a general overview help link in the upper left corner of the page.
Domain Name
You must always provide a domain name for a virtual server account (there are ways to create websites for users without domains using Virtualmin, but that is a much simpler problem and isn't the focus of Virtualmin).
Description
The description is simply a short description of the domain. It is free text, and does not impact any aspect of the virtual server, so it can be just about anything. It will appear as the "Real Name" of the domain user in the Users and Groups module.
Contact email address
Here, you select what email address should receive notifications about this domain, including the creation email that lists the available services, provides login instructions, etc. If you choose to generate the password later on, this may be the only way for the user to find out the password, so it may be appropriate to choose Other address.. and enter the users preferred address in the field provided.
Administration password
You can choose to have a password generated randomly, which is a good idea from a security standpoint. Virtualmin will generate a reasonably long (8+ characters) random password, which will be sent to the user via email. They can, of course, immediately change the password when they login.
Other options
All of the other options can generally be left alone. We'll discuss many of them in more detail later on, but for now, let's just assume that the defaults are perfect.
When you click the Create Server button, Virtualmin will spin into action...it will create the new user and group, add Apache virtual host configuration, add a zone and domain to BIND, add virtual domain configuration to Postfix, create new databases and users in MySQL and PostgreSQL, configure SpamAssassin and ClamAV for the domain, configure log rotation and Webalizer log reports, (woo! I'm getting tired just talking about it...that Virtualmin works hard so you don't have to) and configures any optional Virtualmin Plugin features, like Mailman mailing lists or SubVersion revision control repositories.
Now you can return to the Virtualmin main page and you'll see your new domain in the list of available domains. Clicking on the domain allows you to edit all of the options we just configured, so you can always return to the domain to alter the settings (be careful with that feature, however, as turning off a feature may delete user data...Virtualmin will warn you before destructive changes).
The domain owner can also login using the new domain account and the password you assigned (or that was randomly generated).
Bandwidth MonitoringBandwidth monitoring is a standard feature of Virtualmin, allowing the administrator to limit bandwidth usage or simply notify users and administrators when a domain is approaching and has surpassed their allotted network bandwidth.
To find out bandwidth usage of your domains, click the Bandwidth Usage link in the left-hand menu (if unavailable, bandwidth monitoring has not been enabled for your account).
Virtualmin Professional provides the ability for domain owners, resellers, and administrators to easily install dozens of PHP and Perl scripts within a Virtualmin domain. It also allows for one or more scripts to be installed automatically on server creation, based on the selec ted Server Template for the new domain. New Script Installer scripts can also easily be writ ten using the Install Scripts to add support for internally developed applications.
To install a new script select the domain you'd like to install for in the dropdown menu at the top of the left-hand menu, and then click Install Scripts. Then, click the radio button next to the script you'd like to install, and optionally select a version (often both a stab
le and development version are provided). Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page and clic
k the Show Install Options button.
On this page, you'll be able to select the database to use from existing databases, optionally create a new database, and choose the name of the subdirectory to install the script under.
Clicking Install Now will then install the script and setup the database with the appropr
iate items. Some scripts don't need a database, and so the database-related option will be unavailable.