No need for the system information as this is a general question.
I am looking to move my server back in-house to run off my apple iMac. I have searched for solutions to install virtualmin onto OSX but most of it is pretty negative and outdated.
Has any progress been made in this area? Has anyone achieved it and are there any guides or how-to documents I can read through?
Or do I dig out an old server and install linux on it? Or run a virtual linux machine on the iMac? Seems a shame to have to do that.
Unless you’re an expert on everything in the stack, I strongly recommend you just put a supported Linux distro in a VM and run it there.
I spent a ton of time trying to make OS X usable as a server several years ago, and the state of package management, and the general lack of server oriented tools and capabilities, make it wholly unsuitable for the task. Even when they offered a “server” version, it wasn’t fit for purpose.
Package management is the biggest failure. Everyone uses Homebrew, and Homebrew is terrible for servers. Everything runs as the user doing the installation, which is a security catastrophe. You could use macports or fink and that’s somewhat better, but the packages often aren’t very well-maintained (the big ones, like Apache, and BIND, and Mariadb, are usually OK, but you’re not going to be able to use the Virtualmin mail stack on MacOS easily).
And, Virtualmin doesn’t really know how to deal with users and groups on MacOS.
I would expect it to take a month or two of dedicated work by an expert to stand up Virtualmin on MacOS, for some definition of “working”, but it will still be missing a bunch of features that are supported on Linux (and the BSDs are more reasonable, though not as well-supported as Linux). You’d probably also need to do some programming in Virtualmin and Webmin to handle the ways MacOS is not actually a UNIX.