if anyone cares to contribute, i knocked up a guide for steering nooblets like myself around some of the potential potholes in getting a VPS up and running with Webmin/Virtualmin
although there is much information in the documentation and the forums, i often found myself searching elsewhere and asking in the forum for answers to problems i had (“had”=“largely created myself”)
the goal with this guide is to offer a largely complete, concise guide which addresses everything the nooblet needs to get up and running from DNS, to Virtuamin, to a functioning CMS for a single user with 1 IPv4 address
several of you have helped me along and i’d like to share some of that knowledge with others
if you’d like to contribute, your expertise would be super appreciated - i think i have most of the basics hammered out, but there’s still much to do and corrections to be made
information for contributing is in the repo, or you can simply post here - contributors will of course be credited
Nice one staying away from youtube and all the junk there on.
I like the idea as I found the official docs a bit too comprehensive for a noob.
A couple of quick asks though … why AlmaLinux 9.1 ? Some noobs will not know what that is or RHEL or any of the other specifically weird flavours of Linux, I don’t - so don’t expect others to know. Are you excluding them?
Why only LAMP build - I for one will not touch Apache (and know of others with same opinion) the LEMP build works just as well out of the box. Are you excluding them?
As always with documentation it is best written for those who need it most by those with the same level of experience (as soon as you get experience you tend to get too technical and soon dispense with it altogether).
Alma isn’t a weird flavor of Linux, not at all - Red Hat killed the CentOS project and so 2 forks were created; Alma and Rocky - both are enterprise level OS’s (you can think of Alma as being the new Cent), however i think Alma may turn out to be the more ethical of the two in the long run from a free software POV (Alma is non-profit)
anyone that is familiar with CentOS will feel right at home with Alma (or Rocky) since it is essentially a drop-in replacement for Cent
while CSF “works” with Ubuntu, i think it is much better integrated with a RHEL derivative out-of-the-box
no doubt CSF will require an hour or more of initial set-up for those unfamiliar with it, but the task is a simple one in that it only requires some (some=a lot) reading and flipping preferences on and off rather than dealing with RegEx’s and scripting
CSF also includes a Login Failure Damon (LFD) which can watch most any log file you want, as well as monitor the integrity of critical system files, or any other files you wish, and setting it up could hardly be any simpler
i’m more keen on nginx, but for the moment it seems Virtualmin works better with Apache according to what i’ve read - there’s a couple features of Virtualmin that aren’t available with nginx, though i’ll be damned if i can find that document at the moment
another reason is that i don’t want to lengthen the guide with options - it started out as notes for my personal use, but i decided to format and document it better and stick it on-line
I get it.
BTW thanks for the info on Alma and others not sure if it changes my opinion on the weird and wonderful aberrations of Linux though just adds even more. As for CSF I’m even more sceptical. I have been in this game for over 50 years and have seen a great deal of wishy washy go under the bridge.
As far as LEMP vs LAMP stack well that is another issue altogether. though there are issues the forum has helped resolve them and I have not come across
mmm, yes - and both Alma and Rocky are nearly bit identical for the moment, however while many VPS providers offer Alma, there are very few offering Rocky ISOs - not sure what that means, but there it is
CSF has been around since 2006 - i’m not nearly geeky enough to speak on it authoritatively regarding the internals, but i do know it is liked by many and i think it offers (much) greater protection from brute-force attacks out-of-the-box than does, for instance, fail2ban, but that’s just my personal opinion based on my sub-par level of expertise
Alma seems to be the most popular rebuild of RHEL these days. It is not weird at all. It’s one of the two obvious successors to CentOS now that CentOS isn’t a rebuild of RHEL, anymore (and is more like Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian, in that it has much lower guarantees about longterm stability and compatibility).
Just as much as RHEL or even CentOS. Are we trying to guide folk to use AlmaLinux in preference to anything else (that is an entirely different debate). I thought Virtualmin was above that by not being so fussy.
I sort of understand the longevity issues with Alma vs CentOS but why not Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian?
But my point here (as a noob to Virtualmin) was about not being too specific here (in noob documentation) unless it actually is a must have as part of the core requirements of the system being documented . As far as Virtualmin is concerned (which if I am correct it definitely is not) and @vmin did indicate that his “noob document” was being prepared from a “personal” perspective.
I’m not trying to guide anybody. This thread was not started by any Virtualmin staff. It’s a community project, and I guess volunteers can do anything they want.
I use and prefer Rocky. But, Alma is fine. Ubuntu LTS is fine. Debian is OK (not great, though; shorter lifecycle makes it somewhat less pleasant to maintain longterm).
Edit: My point is that Alma is not weird. It is one of the obvious heir apparents to CentOS. Anybody that would have installed CentOS a couple years ago should consider either Rocky or Alma today (or the free RHEL, but that’s a different sort of equation…).
