Change Home Directory

Howdy,

Hmm, what distribution/version are you using?

And how did you perform your Virtualmin installation, did you by chance use the install.sh script?

-Eric

I've lately seen some "tutorials" which indeed perform the Virtualmin installation the manual way. Especially as a newbie, I highly recommend not following those, but using the installer script, like Eric mentioned. It will save you a lot of trouble and grey hair. ;)

Hehe, I know how that feels.

To use the installer script, it is advised to do that only on a bare system, freshly installed, with only SSH as additional package. So if you can, you should reinstall the system.

Uh-oh, several unfortunate things in there.

1. It is suggested to only use the LTS versions of Ubuntu, since only those are fully supported (and will get updates for a sufficiently long period). Those are 8.04, 10.04 and 12.04.

2. Your system should have a fully qualified hostname, like "host.domain.tld". To get that, you need to configure several files in /etc correctly. I can list those when required. You can test validity using the command hostname which should reply with just a hostname, and hostname -f and hostname -A which should both reply with the identical FQDN (hostname plus domain). Example from my mail hosting VM:

root@australis:~# hostname
australis
root@australis:~# hostname -f
australis.tianet.de
root@australis:~# hostname -A
australis.tianet.de

3. You seem to be operating behind a NAT router, according to your 192.168.* address. Additional steps need to be done to get that up and running correctly. Namely several ports need to be forwarded (25, 80, 443, 110, 143, 995, 997, 21 and possibly others) and FTP needs special configuration.

4. The fatal error might indicate that the system could not retrieve package updates. Make sure the system can correctly reach the Internet and the Ubuntu package repositories.

Virtualmin should work fine also behind a router at home. Though having an FQDN for your server would be very preferable, since it makes things much easier. To be honest, I have never used Vmin without an FQDN, and don't know precisely what problem will arise where if you don't have one.

To acquire one for your home server, all you need is an externally resolvable FQDN of the form "host.domain.tld". You could use any number of free (dynamic) DNS providers for that, e.g. dyndns.org. You'll need that - i.e. a static FQDN - anyway if you intend to receive email from the Internet.

On your server, the important files in /etc are "hosts", "hostname" and "mailname". If you set those correctly before running the script, all should be okay. Mine look like this:

root@australis:~# cat /etc/hostname
australis
root@australis:~# cat /etc/hosts
176.9.191.26    australis.tianet.de     australis
root@australis:~# cat /etc/mailname
australis.tianet.de

Note that "hosts" contains more lines, I pasted only the relevant one. If you enter the hostname and domain part during Ubuntu installation, those things should be correct already. On your router you should not need to change anything.

Okay, the hostname looks good now!

During installation, it would seem that the script, or rather the invoked apt-get command, cannot download several packages.

Before we go into this further: I can see that you're still using Ubuntu 12.10. It is possible that there are some compatibility issues, since that version is not officially supported. It's generally not recommended to use bleeding-edge versions of Linux distros for servers. Can't say much more about this unfortunately, since I'm only using LTS versions. :)

Can you try Ubuntu 12.04? I'm using that version myself and know that it works okay.

Howdy,

This is a fresh install of ubuntu sever 12.04 with only openssh installed.

Just to add to what Locutus mentioned -- although it may have been your intention to install Ubuntu 12.04, it really does look like you have Ubuntu 12.10 there. The Virtualmin installer outputs the Ubuntu version it sees, and your error message contains "Ubuntu 12.10" in the text.

My suggestion would be to try downloading the 12.04 install CD's again, and then redo your install.

The Virtualmin installer should work great on Ubuntu 12.04.

-Eric

Yepp, thanks Eric, I forgot to mention that I spotted the 12.10 in the error log. :)

What do you mean with "access it from the frontend"? As in, log in to Virtualmin as the vserver owner? Or watch the vserver's web contents?

If the former, you access Virtualmin like usual, at https://ip:10000 and enter the username and password of the vserver at the login. (Vmin uses Linux users for its login, and one of those gets created whenever you set up a virtual server.)

Your Virtualmin will probably use your external IP in the DNS zone. So if you want to preview the website like a visitor from the outside would see it, you need to a) enter your Virtualmin server's IP as nameserver into your local network PC's network configuration, and b) make sure your router forwards connections to its external IP, also from the internal network, to the right LAN machine (this is call "NAT reflection").

Otherwise, Virtualmin has a Preview function of its own, check the "Services" menu.

Howdy,

Also, rather than using IP addresses, I'd recommend setting up a domain name on your server.

You can do that for all your accounts with just one domain name... there's details on setting that up here in the section titled "How do I make a users website available at "http://www.mydomain.tld/~username":

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/web/faq