I am using FreeBSD and installed the GPL version first, then used the wbm.
My question is where do i put the serial/license information, and how do i let virtualmin know it is there.
Thanks.
also, This is a new OS install, if there was a method to install it fresh on freebsd, I would rather have done that but it looks like it is still under development. If there is a method of running the install script under FreeBSD can you give me the steps.
Hey Jaron,
The license and serial number go into:
/etc/virtualmin-license
And the form of the file is:
SerialNumber=XXXX
LicenseKey=YYYY
Where XXXX is your actual serial number and YYYY is your actual license key.
There’s a new upgrade mode for Virtualmin GPL, as well, that will ask for these details and set it up for you (it’ll also download the Professional module–we’re working hard these days on making the upgrade path painless).
also, This is a new OS install, if there was a method to install it fresh on freebsd, I would rather have done that but it looks like it is still under development. If there is a method of running the install script under FreeBSD can you give me the steps.
install.sh does not work with FreeBSD yet. (Making script work is the easy part. The hard part is packaging the software using native packages and testing it all.)
I’m hoping to offer FreeBSD support by the end of the month. But it’s never safe to believe me when I put dates on OS support–adding new ones always take longer than anticipated.
Tony,
It would be nice for an installation guide if you have succesfully managed to install Virtualmin on FreeBSD. If you want money to have it published in public, im shure there are a few people willing to pay for this.
Best Regards.
All,
Thanks for the info on FreeBSD setup. I’ve been sidetracked for awhile, ut I’ll try to install on a clean machine tonight, see how it goes.
Has anyone had trouble with username length. In previous webmin/virtualmin setups I’ve adjusted the default freebsd username length from 15 to 47 chars. That way my user names can be user@fullyqualifieddomain.name With 15 chars I could only do user@fullyquali and that would create a duplicate name if I was also hosting fullyqualifieddomain.com.
I never did like small psuedo-random user names with aliases to the human readable email names.
Steve
OK, Virtulmin Pro is up and running on FreeBSD. Took 5 hours, but I’ve never set up postfix before, and the webmin had a failure getting the mapping file setup. The script Joe provided at http://software.virtualmin.com/lib/mail-setup.pl to resolve bug 830 did not run on freebsd and had to be re-written.
One error I cannot resolve:
… install failed : Module security-updates does not support this operating system (FreeBSD 6.2)
I haven’t actually tested mail yet, but all programs are installed, and VPro says it is ready and running OK.
Top left corner of the menu has the Virtualmin tab overlaying the login: username field.
Hey Steve,
Has anyone had trouble with username length. In previous webmin/virtualmin setups I’ve adjusted the default freebsd username length from 15 to 47 chars. That way my user names can be user@fullyqualifieddomain.name With 15 chars I could only do user@fullyquali and that would create a duplicate name if I was also hosting fullyqualifieddomain.com.
That limit was put in place specifically for FreeBSD users! 
If FreeBSD now supports longer names than that, we’ll all be happy to hear it. I always thought it was a stupid nuisance, and it’s one of the things I didn’t look forward to officially supporting. (I’ve just started work on the FreeBSD version of the installer, so I’m still learning.)
I never did like small psuedo-random user names with aliases to the human readable email names.
Yeah, we don’t like it either. That’s why we always liked Linux better for Virtualmin. But, if it’s been corrected in FreeBSD, that’s even better.
Hey Steve,
The script Joe provided at http://software.virtualmin.com/lib/mail-setup.pl to resolve bug 830 did not run on freebsd and had to be re-written.
Yeah, all of our scripts are quite specific to the supported Operating Systems, and should never be expected to work on an unsupported system. They can be looked to for guidance on what we do when setting up a system, but they are by no means a substitute for knowing how things ought to be done on the system you’re working with.
One error I cannot resolve:
… install failed : Module security-updates does not support this operating system (FreeBSD 6.2)
Nothing to resolve there. We don’t support FreeBSD packages or ports yet, so the security updates module isn’t going to work on that platform. It’ll have to be updated manually. This will change in the next few weeks, as I am now actively working on BSD support. But, for now, FreeBSD brings a few extra hassles.
Top left corner of the menu has the Virtualmin tab overlaying the login: username field.
Restart your browser, or force a reload of /unauthenticated/style.css. This is just an old stylesheet hanging around.
Webmin theme support pre-dated all of this new-fangled CSS and JavaScript stuff, so it doesn’t very gracefully handle them. That’s a quirk that will be corrected in the not distant future.
This is from the manpage for the adduser script on a fresh FreeBSD 6.2…
RESTRICTIONS
username
Login name. The user name is restricted to whatever pw(8) will
accept. Generally this means it may contain only lowercase char-
acters or digits. Maximum length is 16 characters. The reasons
for this limit are historical. Given that people have tradition-
ally wanted to break this limit for aesthetic reasons, it has
never been of great importance to break such a basic fundamental
parameter in UNIX. You can change UT_NAMESIZE in utmp.h and
recompile the world; people have done this and it works, but you
will have problems with any precompiled programs, or source that
assumes the 8-character name limit and NIS. The NIS protocol
mandates an 8-character username. If you need a longer login
name for e-mail addresses, you can define an alias in
/etc/mail/aliases.
OK, on the username length, I should have been more specific. FreeBSD still has the 15 char limit. I recompiled the BSD source and changed the length to 48. It requires 4 very simple and eqasy to find changes. Got to run to dinner now, but I’ll post the source changes later tonight.
I’m still a little confused about which parts/modules of VirtualMin are operating system specific and which are not.
I thought from context of previous posts that the upgrade of a GPL system would mostly involve the parts that are cross platform compatible. All loaded except the security.
The main pronlem in the script to fix bug 830 was the paths. I adjusted those and it mostly worked. Problem is it still dies for a reason I cannot determin.
VMin Pro is running though and I can create domains. Now just trying to get the mail set up properly. Postfix is new to me.
Any thoughts on how to allow pop3 for local addresses and force pop3s for untrusted addresses?
I asked the wrong question about pop3. Should have been how can I allow smpt authorization by IP address for trusted addresses inside my network, but require openssl and smtp auth for untrusted IP for customeres on the road.
To make Freebsd support longer usernames - For username up to 48 characters:
Change MAXLOGNAME in /usr/include/sys/param.h to 49
Change MAXLOGNAME in /usr/src/sys/sys/param.h to 49
Change UT_NAMESIZE in /usr/include/utmp.h to 48
Change UT_NAMESIZE in /usr/src/include/utmp.h to 48
This works in FreeBSD 5.3+. Somewhere before 5.3 you also had to modify adduser because it did not read the system defaults properly.
Modify adduser — not needed in 5.3+
cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/adduser
change adduser.perl line from]16 to]48
make install to rebuild adduser if you’re not rebuilding world.
Some systutils would not display properly in 5.3. For example, "top" had all the data, but the headers did not line up to show memory usage in the proper places. This is fixed in 6+.
I just discovered something new about FreeBSD 6.2.
I had skipped all the steps to change the max usernamesize to 48 chars (oops) and Virtualmin still worked with large user names. Not quite sure how. The only thing that doesn’t work is trying to log onto the server console with a large username. That fails with an invalid argument error. Earlier versions would not let virtualmin even add large usernames unless the code was recompiled. I gather that the behaivor in 6.2 has been changed to not allow large logins rather than not allow creation of large names.
I created a user named steve-12345678901.com (21 chars).
I can send mail and receive mail via outlook express through postfix and dovecot. I can log onto usermin and send and receive mail. Proftpd allows the user to logon and transfer data.
I prefer users not being able to log onto the server console. I’ll test further to see if anything is broken, but looks good.
Any thoughts on how to allow pop3 for local addresses and force pop3s for untrusted addresses?
You can configure Dovecot to listen only on the internal addresses for pop3, if that’s the way you define “local addresses”. If it’s less specific than that, you’d probably find it simplest to just firewall the pop3/imap port (pop3s and imaps have their own ports) to only allow access to the local addresses.
Dovecot also supports IP checking via PAM, but I’m not sure off-hand how that works or how it is configured.
Hey Steve,
I had skipped all the steps to change the max usernamesize to 48 chars (oops) and Virtualmin still worked with large user names. Not quite sure how.
Magic.
Actually, Webmin and Usermin can fall back to handling user:pass checking on its own (regardless of PAM, shadow, MD5 vs. crypt, etc. configuration). It has no (reasonable) username length limitations. If you have the Perl PAM module installed, it’ll use PAM and be limited by whatever PAM imposes.
All of the others surprise me, since they are almost certainly using PAM to authenticate. (I’m wholly unfamiliar with the innards of FreeBSD…I assume it uses PAM in some form.)
I gather that the behaivor in 6.2 has been changed to not allow large logins rather than not allow creation of large names.
That’s nicer. But prone to pain for users that aren’t aware of it. We’ll keep the 15 char username limit in place, by default on FreeBSD, and document the variable changes needed (Thanks for digging those details up and sharing them, by the way!).
That would explain it… Virtualmin uses its own routines and handles the increased username size, while BSD routines keep the limit and require the re-compile.
I suspect that I’ll have to recompile the OS anyway to allow the system to fully support 48 char username, just to make sure something down the road doesn’t bite me.
I’ve been running GPL Virtualmin on BSD 5.3 and 6.1 with the 48&49 char changes above successfully for awhile now with no problems.
Steve
Howdy Miki,
I agree, which is why FreeBSD is still not listed as a Grade A supported OS.
I don’t know that I’d call it half ready, however…several folks are using it in production. And, of course, most of the problems are things we simply can’t fix.
FreeBSD has some limitations that make it less than ideal for virtual hosting, unfortunately, and we can’t fix them.
Secondary group limits means that homes have to have permissions of 751, instead of 750. This isn’t a huge concern, as long as your users don’t habitually set permissions to 777 “for testing” and then forget to set them to something sane (this is never a good idea, but it’s ridiculously common and I still see people suggesting it on various PHP programming forums).
Username length is uncomfortably short, and a recompile of world is required to fix it (and we’re not even going to think about recompiling world as part of our installation process!).
Some of the ports and pkgs are broken. ProFTPd is the most obvious of these, and I’ve noted it in the release announcement for FreeBSD support (and it’ll be in the new per-OS installation notes that I’m writing as we speak). There’s a bug report in the FreeBSD bug tracker about ProFTPd from January, but it hasn’t been fixed, as far as I know. There’s not much we can do when the OS is broken–we have enough on our plates without having to fix the underlying OS.
But, we definitely want to know about any other problems you had with the install. If it’s not a “known issue” I’d like to at least know about it…and maybe I can even fix it.
BTW-The OS support page is here:
http://www.virtualmin.com/os-support.html
It is listed in the menu at the bottom of every page, as well.