Hi, I have a VPS that is running Debian 8 Jesse, PHP 5.6 and MySQL 5.5 This is because I need to run an old application that is not compatible with later versions.
I fully understand the security implications and the VPS is firewalled etc with restricted public access.
I am used to Webmin on other systems and would like to install Webmin on this VPS.
My questions are, can I install the latest version of Webmin on this VPS (in other words is the latest version of Webmin backwards compatible with my VPS)? Also,
will installing Webmin change any pre-existing VPS configuration? Obviously I’ll do a snapshot before installation, but it would make things a lot easier if existing config files were not overwritten or changed.
With all softwares, you can install it but there’s no guarantee that it will work properly on outdated, end of life, no longer supported software.
All you can do is try it yourself and hope for the best.
Nobody is going to guarantee you one way or the other if it’ll work or if it is backward compatible on outdated, end of life, no longer supported software because it’s puts them in a position of liability.
Go for it. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
Thanks for your reply. Position of liability? Then what’s the point of this support forum if no-one is willing to provide any answers in case they get taken to court?
I thought this was a friendly forum where people could ask questions and get help and advice?
I didn’t ask for any guarantees. And of course I could try it and see if it works, but in that case I’d have done it without asking here first. I don’t follow the “just press the button and see what it does” mantra, I research things first and my question here is part of that research.
I can assure everyone here that I am not looking for any legally binding guarantees, just friendly advice. Does anyone know if Webmin is backwards compatible with Debian 8?
We do not test on EOL distributions, and we consider our target Perl version to be the version in the oldest distribution we support (at the moment, that is Perl 5.16 in RHEL/CentOS 7). If Debian 8 has a Perl that is 5.16 or newer, Webmin will probably work fine.
Virtualmin will very likely no longer install on Debian 8 using the automated install process. So, you shouldn’t expect Virtualmin to be easy to run on Debian 8.
I’ll also mention that if you don’t mind running old software, old versions of Webmin are still available for download, if the Perl version on Debian 8 is too old for current Webmin versions. If old software is fine, old Webmin should be fine for you, too.
There’s probably no good way to get Virtualmin (the whole stack, not just the virtual-server module) installed on an old system, though, since the installer needs maintained software repos, and we don’t maintain repos for EOL software, because we have limited time on this earth and we’re not going to use it supporting distros that are unsupported by the distribution maintainers themselves.
It is. And you got a friendly honest answer. Joe essentially told you the same exact thing that I did: that nobody supports old, outdated, end of life software.
