New Virtualmin user, where to start?

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

Forgive the totally newbish question, but I’ve looked through the documentation and I find it somewhat cryptic, I’ve looked around here in the forums and haven’t found anything that directly pertains to my issue although I have found some very informative information that I believe will be helpful in the future.

I just started leasing a dedicated server with a hosting company. This new dedicated server has Virtualmin GPL on it. I am fairly familiar with Webmin.

I have multiple reseller accounts and a few shared hosting accounts with a different hosting company. Those accounts all have WHM/cPanel (WHM for the primary reseller accounts, and cPanel for the client accounts).

I don’t actually ‘sell’ hosting services, I’m a web developer and handle the hosting in with my development so my clients don’t have to worry with it. I only have 1 purely hosting client and that one has their own reseller account with the original hosting company. They will stay there for now.

The new dedicated server with Virtualmin is currently configured with no domain name, I access it via IP address only at the moment. The server went active very recently, so I’m just now starting to get a handle on getting things configured and want to start in the best way possible from the beginning.

I intend to move all of my current web sites (in time) to the new dedicated box, with my development business site being the first, however I’m not sure if I should configure that site as a virtual server or as the box itself via the webmin view when logged in to Virtualmin. This is where I’m not sure to proceed.

It will take me a few days to get the files, database and DNS transferred to point to the new hosting company, so I’d prefer to not have my new server ignore me if I set its host name to my domain name and then continue to attempt to access it via IP or something.

A couple of options that I can think of off hand:

Configure the server as a who to example.com with each of my clients as virtual servers under it. - I will still have to access the box via IP until I can get all of the files, and DNS and everything moved. A couple of days I guess?

or

Leave the server IP based as it is and set all of my accounts (including my own) as virtual servers under it. This would solve the IP issue, but might possibly create other issues I suppose.

What would you experience people recommend I do to get started?

2

Some thoughts from my end:

First off, it’s recommended to operate Virtualmin on a server with a fully qualified domain name. In fact the Re-check configuration function should complain if the machine does not have a FQDN.

Whether you wish to configure your development vserver through Virtualmin or more directly through Webmin is a matter of preference I suppose, and depends on wheterh you expect to be applying changes that Vmin offers rather often or rather rarely. I personally would use a Vmin server for it, as to not have to fiddle with an “out of the ordinary” Apache config manually.

As for accessing the server via IP: You can always instruct Vmin to set one specific vserver as the default for the respective IP, that will have Apache serve all requests to unknown virtual host names from that vserver.

3

Thanks for the response Locutus!

I ran a ‘Re-check configuration’ function and it didn’t complain that the server does not have a FQDN right now. Perhaps it is because it is because it is running by IP only right now?

I suppose it would be better to configure some account plans for the server, and set up my primary domain as a virtual server, then set it as the default server for the primary server IP. Then I can configure my other clients as virtual servers on the box as well.

I presume this is what you’re talking about?

4

Yep, that’s what I meant. :slight_smile:

About FQDN: What does hostname -f output?

5

After going to the Webmin side of the menu and looking at the Hostname in the Networking configuration I discovered that the hosting company has set a FQDN on the dedicated server that is under their domain name.

The new hosting company recommends leaving the existing hostname as it is, and configuring all of my hosting accounts, including “mybusiness.com” as virtual servers on the box, which is basically as you reccommended.

I’ll give this a go and see how it works out.

Thanks again Locutus!

6

Okidoki, you’re welcome! :slight_smile:

And yes, you should leave the FQDN of the system at the name which its IP address reverse-resolves to. You can find that out using

dig -x ip-address-of-server

Some hosters offer their customers to edit the RDNS entry through their control web interface. If you can do that, you might set something more fancy (but make sure not to cause collisions with some of your other domains), after which you can adapt the server’s FQDN.