What happens now!
Currently when you setup a new Virtual server, you select your ‘Account Plan’ and a ‘Server Template’, these settings are copied and installed into the new server and then the ‘Account Plan’ is not used anymore, even though it is listed as the ‘Account Plan’ in ‘Edit Virtual Server → Configurable settings → Account plan’
Read directly from ‘Account Plans’
‘Account Plan’ settings should be read directly from the plan which will allow ‘Account Plans’ to be updated by admins and the changes then reflected on all virtual servers using the plan.
Allow for Legacy users
The ‘Edit Owner Limit’ which is where all of the settings are copied too now, could be used to override the account plan settings as required. This page should be renamed to ‘Override Account Plan Limits’. This would require an additional check box on the ‘Edit Owners Limits’ page to allow overriding of ‘Account Plan’ settings. This override setting could be a configurable permission somewhere upstream to allow or deny this feature.This is not my preference but would allow current users to still use Virtualmin as they have been doing with no change but also allowing this feature to be implemented.
Why is this possible! What is ‘Edit Owner Limits’ for when you have ‘Account Plans’
In this thread I had a discussion about what the ‘Edit Owner Limits’ was for and now I know it is the repository for the settings when they are copied from the ‘Account Plan’ which is a sort of template, services and other things are read from ‘Edit Owner Limits’ for the configured values such as bandwidth quota and permissions, but not directly from the 'Account Plan.
If you look at the picture below, there is a tick-box which effectively will apply all of the settings from the new ‘Account Plan’ onto the Virtual Server’s current ‘Edit Owner Limits’, effectively overwriting them. This shows that these settings can be changed on the fly.
Server Templates
I would like to see this feature on ‘Server Templates’ but this might not be possible on all settings in them, perhaps have look at that after ‘Account Plans’ are modified.
Personally I have 100 domains, 30 of which are on the default plan
The other 70 have maybe one or to options changed from the default plan and are nearly all different .
I don’t really want to maintain 60+ plans as it may be difficult to remember who is on what plan of I could put each domain on it’s own plan and edit the plan each time, edit owner limits is more useful to me, but each to their own
Sounds simple on the surface but might entail quite a lot of extra effort to implement with all the checks.
It would be very important to continue to support existing setup.
But I, like I suspect most users, don’t have much of a need for “Account Plans”, or at this point in time a need, or desire, to change and have to maintain them. It sounds like a bit of an edge case and perhaps could be handled in a simpler/bespoke way.
@jimr My proposals will not affect you at all. During the upgrade the ‘Override Account Plan’ tick box will automatically be applied to exisiting virtual servers.
Blockquote
But I, like I suspect most users, don’t have much of a need for “Account Plans”"
Only if you live in a bubble , 90% of the other Panels out there (if not all) use Account Plans in the way I outlined above. This is not something I have just invented. Consider this scenario (which a lot of people on Virtualmin GPL probably are):
I am a windows techy that has installed ubunutu and then Virtualmin.
I don’t know Linux but can follow instructions which is why I am using Virtualmin because it is GUI driven
I have 10 clients
I have 4 ‘Account Plans’ with different quotas e.g. Internal(5000MiB), Bronze (1000MiB), Silver (1500MiB), Gold (2000MiB)
8 of my clients are on bronze
I now want to increase the disk space on all of the Bronze to 1500mb. I have couple of options
use the command line tool (no experience)
manual update each account via ‘Edit Owner limits’
or
My solution,
just edit the account plan and all attached virtual servers are updated.
This solution is not just for disk quotas. People using Virtualmin use it to make their life easier, not so they can do everything by command line. I am not a full time hoster and definately do not host as many sites as other people.
For this guy I work with he has 300 cPanel accounts and we recently needed to increase disk quotas on them all, so all i did was edit the plan/package and then it was done.
My solution reduces workload and will not changes anyone’s current setup if they like to manually edit owners permissions on every account.
The development of this feature would not be massive I suspect, because I feel a lot of the mechanisms are already there to allow for this.
Although as I said that I agree in principal with the proposal, I do disagree with the need.
I for one do not fit in with your interpretation of a Virtualmin user.
I do not care about cPanel users, they are not my problem, I have more than 10 clients (most with < 3 domains, most requiring their box in the locale of their business), I only have one “Account plan” (the default) and remain sceptical about changing them for any client (and even more so on a regular - ie maintenance requirement basis). I have not yet encountered any client wishing to change a quota. Such changes require my direct involvement and much consultation. (only one in 10+ years)
Of course I may be wrong and this may prove to be popular.
@jimr1 You are correct that ‘Save and Apply’ pushes the changes to the plan members. thanks
Some small followups:
The following are synced:
Basic plan details
Allowed capabilities
Not synced:
Allowed virtual servers features
but I am not really sure what this does
Other restrictions
This is not present in ‘Account Plan’ and these settings come from the 'Server Template. I included this entry for reference only.
I do think the logic needs some sorting here in how it is presented to the user, such as my override solution I think would be a perfect. I could not be happier that the system that I want is already programmed, just hidden a little. I am going to have a think and then post an updated suggestion.
but in the meantime, ‘Allowed virtual server features’ what does this actually do and should it be in a 'Server Template? I did look for documentation but I could not find any?
notice only webmin login is ticked (which is what I asked for) so I just click the create button without worrying about what options are ticked but TBF automatic works for most I guess
You don’t really need them if you are set to auto opon domain creation as it does most things that you need . If you need to change something after creation put the domain in question in another plan. I am struggling for use case for them being in a template please enlighten me
The ‘server templates’ purpose is to configure the virtual server as required. This to me would be such things as DNS, no DNS, Email or no email.
These ‘Allowed virtual server features’ are virtual server configurations. These are not permissions but a configuration of the virtual server and as such should be in the virtual server template.
After looking at the options in ‘Allowed virtual server features’, they match the
Virtualmin → System Settings → Server Template → template sections
Virtualmin → System Settings → Features and Plugins
Virtuamin → Administration Options → Allowed features for servers
These installation triggers should be moved to the server template as an additional option at the top of each section to process installation things.
on creation that is true what happens when you want to edit them ?
why ? You have not explained the logic as to why they should be in a template.
So to be fair you are trying to reinvent the virtualmin wheel, in the last 15+ years this is the first time I have seen suggestions like this. That said we all have a different take on how software should work, it would appear you take the approach of ‘one size fits all’ where as I prefer the more granular approach. I do find domain owners all have different needs/wants hence the granular approach that I use. From how virtualmin is presented at this moment of time you can achieve virtually anything you want to do, but I must admit some options are well buried in some places for example try and find Allow mailbox users to create mail filters which I use a lot but it is located in an odd place, however once this is checked it is all set up. So I think your problems arise from, what you see as, the UI being oddly laid out. If you take some time to learn how to use Virtualmin you will find out what each function does. My suggestion is to create a dev server, install virtualmin and use every option to find out what they do and perhaps, make notes on where each function/option is located
I am trying to figure out the purpose of ‘Allowed virtual server features’ in the account plan?
What settings does it change?
Where are these settings in the virtual server account?
Who and why would you use them?
The automatic options is even more confusing?
are they only used on creation of a virtual server?
Then I can makes notes and figure out if it is a good thing or not. There is no documentation on this feature and I have been through the whole forum.
p.s. I have been through most of Virtualmin and made extensive notes, it is this feature that is getting me boggled at the minute. I have figured out server templates.
As the previous screen shots showed ot allows you to adjust the defaults upon creation away from the defaults of the template (?) I don’t really know as I have never needed to edit a template the defualts are good enough for the purpose I use. Maybe you are trying to do something away from the norm IDK but I can not see what is confusing about the current setup can you elaborate ?
I think where the confusion was coming from was the following:
The tooltips are not correct, they go on about setting default values where they should not refer to defaults as this is a template. I will try and rewrite these to make clearer.
All of the settings defined in the ‘Account Plan’ are pushed to the ‘Edit Owner Limits’ but the 2 pages of settings do not match, they are laid put different with different Accordion headings. I will be doing a bug report about that.
Some of the settings in the Account Plan → Allowed virtual server features are only available in ‘Account Plan’ because I assume they must be enabled at creation of the virtual server or never.
Administration users
Home directory
What is ‘Allowed virtual server features’
These settings define what services are enabled for the Virtual Servers when the ‘Account Plan’ is applied, but they can be overridden when a user utilises ‘Edit Owner Limits’, perhaps this is why the notes keep referring to default settings. My solution will also correct this.
These are permissions. They do not enable or disable services.
They do have a couple of special options that are only available at Virtual Server creation time (Administration users, Home directory). These cannot be enabled/Disabled in the ‘Edit Owner Limits’ page.
Default available features
I reckon that automatic = if the service is enabled on Virtualmin, then enable the related permisisons.
You can go back to these options later and enable extra options for additional services you have added since the creation of the virtual server.
Tooltip says:
When this option is set theAutomatic (as it is by default), new top-level virtual servers will have their allowed features set based on those initially enabled when the server is created.
Default editing capabilities
This forum post from Eric (VM Staff) gives an outline of how VM does tests on the server template to decide what options you should have.
The tool tip says:
If the Automatic option is selected, limits are determined based on whether the virtual server owner is allowed to create sub-servers or not (controlled by the Limit on number of virtual servers field). If so, he will have access to all capabilities. Otherwise, he can only manage users, aliases and edit web pages.
I am not sure which is correct, or are both correct?
Did you look at the date on Eric’s post (sometime in 2009) I would think it is safe to say that you can disregard comments made that long ago as things have moved on since then. You still haven’t put forward a use case for this yet, I have searched around for a reason to change something that works fine when you get your head around it. But just for an experiment change to the framed theme rather than authentic and see if you get on better with that
I needed to figure out what these last settings did. As you can see I have. These are settings are not related to server templates so should not be put in there as I mentioned earlier.
So currently, Account plans can be re-applied to all members and although they are not read from the ‘Account Plan’ but the ‘Edit Owner Limit’, members can be easily updated by re-applying the ‘account plan’.
Tomorrow I am going to do that bug report and then put together my proposal for clearing these settings and features up. My override method will allow people to carry on exactly as there are now or utilise live ‘Account Plans’ with possibility of overriding them when required if permissions are permitting.
I did notice Eric’s post was from 2009, but information is a little thin on the ground. Until now
The use case for these changes is:
Improvement from a passive Account Plan to a live one (with overrides).
Tooltips and documentation can be amended with better language to make it clearer what they do.
with only 2 folk contributing to this debate, I’m back wondering who is really interested?
Documentation can always be improved but is it worth it? Who RTFM these days? Most with knowledge in IT probably already know that documentation is not really for them and is out of date when it is written. Probably not in their native language anyway.
Sure the documentation could be improved. but would the “improvement” actually be any better?
, 90% of the other Panels out there (if not all) use Account Plans in the way I outlined above. This is not something I have just invented. Consider this scenario (which a lot of people on Virtualmin GPL probably are):
