Command line-admin new to virtualmin

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

Hello,

My name is Jason and I am new to virtualmin. As I have a number of questions, If I need to break them up and repost them individually, please let me know.

I have been a command-line based linux sysadmin for 17 years, and am having some growing pains switching over to virtualmin: likely they are just me being resistant to change…

I have been working (fighting) with a suite called EHCP. It’s written in php but partly in Turkish. It appears that virtualmin does what I want: namely apache http and https, ftp for clients that need it, and outbound mail services with dkim/dmarc.

Presently I run several ubuntu 12.04LTS servers under vmware behind a pfsense firewall. We are planning to get out of the hardware business entirely and go to IAAS such as AWS, or Rackspace.

Some questions:

  1. is the system | Features and Plugins menu the master feature enable/disable point?
  2. if so, when I disable dns, should I see all other dns occurences in virtualmin go gray or something?

DNS:
For DNS it appears out of the box virtualmin wants to configure the local instance of dns to be the canonical dns server for all of the domains I would configure.

  1. I presently manage all of my name server records on external internet dns servers. Is it enough to turn off the Bind DNS feature to use existing dns servers? (it is clear to me I would need to make dns entries on my external servers for new domains as I add them…)
  2. Will playing with the dns entries in virtualmin clash with any webmin management of dns?

EMAIL:
5) When I configure procmail at the command prompt, I have options essentially asking how I want email handled (or not at all. Am I missing something?

User accounts:
6) Does creation of virtual server owners or ftp users generate UNIX accounts, or is it only an “account” within virtualmin? I ask because I would like to have other services (such as ssh and restricted ssh) be manageable at that user level.

  1. I am having some difficulties mapping the sites definitions in virtualmin to apache’s terms. I will try to do it here:
    does “subserver” mean the same thing as apache’s ServerAlias directive?

  2. Can a virtual server owner manage more than one domain? For instance can my “developer” login manage example.com, nothing.com, as well as checkthis.com?

  3. What is meant by “shared ip address?” Does this have anything to do with apache’s IP-based virtual hosts?

  4. Is one instance of virtualmin capable of managing more than one virtualmin server?

  5. Is virtualmin capable of working with high-availability or failover?

  6. For Apache: is virtualmin SNI aware? can it create separate https virtual hosts?

  7. Does virtualmin do any certificate management? (in this case for opendkim, and/or web ssl-certificates…)

Thank you for your help and time!

–jason

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Howdy,

Thanks for your interest in Virtualmin! Since you have a bunch of questions there, I’ll go through them and provide some short answers.

If you’d like to go into more detail on some of those, no problem, though for more detail you may want to open up a separate topic for that particular question.

1) is the system | Features and Plugins menu the master feature enable/disable point?

It used to be that you first had to disable that feature within the various Virtual Servers, and once that was done, you could then disable it in Features and Plugins.

If it’s enabled in Features and Plugins, that means it is available to new Virtual Servers.

However, a recent Virtualmin feature has made it so that disabling it in Features and Plugins also disables it in all the Virtual Servers.

2) if so, when I disable dns, should I see all other dns occurences in virtualmin go gray or something?

All DNS occurrences in your domains should then no longer have DNS enabled, and the DNS option won’t appear as an available feature.

3) I presently manage all of my name server records on external internet dns servers. Is it enough to turn off the Bind DNS feature to use existing dns servers? (it is clear to me I would need to make dns entries on my external servers for new domains as I add them…)

Yup! It’s no problem to host DNS at a third party, you’d just want to disable the DNS feature in that case.

Will playing with the dns entries in virtualmin clash with any webmin management of dns?

It could, depending on what you play with :slight_smile: If you’re editing existing DNS entries, that shouldn’t be a problem.

6) Does creation of virtual server owners or ftp users generate UNIX accounts, or is it only an “account” within virtualmin? I ask because I would like to have other services (such as ssh and restricted ssh) be manageable at that user level.

It creates system accounts, and by default, Virtual Server owners can use SSH.

7) I am having some difficulties mapping the sites definitions in virtualmin to apache’s terms. I will try to do it here: does “subserver” mean the same thing as apache’s ServerAlias directive?

In Apache, a top-level Virtual Server and a Sub-Server are the same thing. Both are just domains, and each can have a website.

Can a virtual server owner manage more than one domain? For instance can my “developer” login manage example.com, nothing.com, as well as checkthis.com?

Yup! The first domain created is the top-level Virtual Server. Every additional domain created for that user is considered a Sub-Server.

9) What is meant by “shared ip address?” Does this have anything to do with apache’s IP-based virtual hosts?

Yup, it’s exactly that.

10) Is one instance of virtualmin capable of managing more than one virtualmin server?

Virtualmin can manage one server. If you’re interested in something for managing multiple servers, and/or multiple Virtualmin instances, you may want to look into Cloudmin.

11) Is virtualmin capable of working with high-availability or failover?

There is nothing in Virtualmin that prevents working with high-availability, though it doesn’t set that up for you. You can set that up on your own, using tools that you’re familiar with, or Cloudmin Pro offers some redundancy features.

12) For Apache: is virtualmin SNI aware? can it create separate https virtual hosts?

Yup! It does that automatically, you just need to enable the SSL feature for a Virtual Server.

13) Does virtualmin do any certificate management? (in this case for opendkim, and/or web ssl-certificates…)

Virtualmin can manage SSL certificates for Apache, Dovecot, Postfix, Webmin, and Usermin.

You can access that ability in Server Configuration -> Manage SSL Certificates.

Virtualmin also supports DKIM, which you can enable in Email Messages -> DomainKeys Identified Mail.

-Eric

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Thank you Eric for your reply!

I found the section called “suggested dns records”… Nice touch there…

I will split this out as needed into different topics.

–jason