There are two deal breakers for me that don't seem to work very well out of the box, or at all, on Debian.
I'm running the latest webmin. These days unencrypted email seems pretty useless, so I wonder why TLS isn't enabled in postfix out of the box.
I also wonder why PHP doesn't get installed, since that's a core feature. Even once I install all the various debian PHP packages, mysql support is broken. After manually enabling mysql.so in the various php.ini files, still no luck.
I'm not an expert in installing PHP (I've always been a big perl person), nor in postfix (always sendmail/qmail), but I have some passing familiarity and I don't feel like virtualmin should be this difficult to get working for these sorts of basic features.
Can some sympathetic Debian virtualmin user out there offer me some words of wisdom? I'm having problems maintaining my enthusiasm. I'd consider switching over to Ubuntu just for the better support, but CentOS doesn't have the same appeal to me, and Ubuntu isn't supported by my current server hosting.
First, sorry if this was the wrong forum for this topic.
Second, I did read all the documentation I could find relating to installing scripts and googled quite a bit and searched the forums quite a bit for topics relating to PHP/mysql on Debian.
I haven't found anything resembling a tutorial or howto on how to actually get it working. I want to take advantage of the time-savings of the virtualmin script installers, but I haven't actually gotten any php/mysql scripts to work yet.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, and I've never even seen Debian. I just wanted to comment ...
It seems that Virtualmin will install the latest Version 5 of php upon my machine. This is not necessarily what some people want because they are still attempting to install scripts that rely upon Version 4. There are some instructions around here someplace (http://www.virtualmin.com/forums/message-view?message%5fid=73664#73664) that tell how to go back to Version 4 if you need to.
That pretty much exhausts what I know about it. I have not even asked you the details of your problem. Do you have difficulties with a particular script, or do you have difficulties making php work with anything ... even a simple[?php echo 'Hello World'; ?>
Mark,
Thanks for the reply. I've gotten php4 working by installing all the usual packages, but the mysql connectivity isn't happening for me with any scripts. phpBB and Drupal in particular. I've messed plenty with the .ini files to no avail.
I'm sure it's a simple, stupid problem, but my point was that virtualmin is supposed to save me time by guaranteeing to that very basic things like php+mysql will work out of the box on my platform. Basically i'm a worthless complaining troll.
On the other hand, if I can figure out what the issue is, I'll try to contribute a fix and redeem myself. I've written to Joe a couple of times without a response, which is no surprise considering his workload.
Seems like a pretty DIY situation when it comes to debian, either that or I'm just an idiot.
I'd just like to take a break from being a whiney baby and mention that I just dist-upgraded to Debian 4.0, and virtual min is humming along (ftp/mail/web are intact so far), and I even got php to work once I found the correct php.ini file (in home/user/etc!).
I do think virtualmin is a great piece of software, in case anyone thought otherwise. I just like whining - that's why I paid for virtualmin. To whine. :)
If I remember correctly, php 5 isn't included in Debian's SARGE default package list. You have to either compile yourself or download from another group that maintains php5 packages for debian.
I remember having to get them from a group name dot deb or something like that.
This would explain why Virtualmin doesn't install php version 5 out of the box. Buy Debian version 4.0 sounds like it started including version 5 and I'm guessing that solved your php issue.
That's a good guess except...
I'd installed php4* and gotten PHP to work, but had issues with MySQL connectivity. I got it to work by enabling the mysql.so extension in the appropriate php.ini file (which was not documented anywhere that I found).
In any case, it's great to know that virtualmin is running smoothly on Debian Etch. I guess you could say that Debian is Ubuntu until Debian unstable starts leaving stable behind again.
-Daniel