Newbie with some questions

Virtualmin
1

Hi everyone,

Newbie to virtualmin, but not a newbie to webmin. Been using webmin for a couple years now and have it down pretty well. Yesterday I started a new server and decided to throw virtualmin on it.

I have created a virtual host. I believe we will only have 1 on this machine, at least for the immediate future. I have a couple of questions relating our sole virtual domain:

The important question:

  1. Is it possible to add system accounts to the domain that were created prior to virtualmin being installed?

And others that have come to mind during setup:

  1. Do I really need virtualmin? My thought is yes because it’s a “one stop shop” for those other admins who don’t know much about system management. Seems like even for the 1 domain, everything is covered for user addition/email addition/spam & virus protection, right?
  2. I don’t want new user accounts to be in /home/domain/homes. Instead, I’d rather them be in /home. I created a symbolic link to take care of that for me. Any repercussions here?
  3. I don’t want our site running out of /home/domain/public_html, so again, another sym link to /var/www/html where I am more comfortable managing it. With it in /home/domain/public_html, I was getting a lot of 503 errors. I’m not getting them with the /var/www/html location. So, any repercussions with this sym link? Things seem to be working well this way.

I think those were the big ones standing out in my head.

Thanks for your time.

2

Howdy,

1) Is it possible to add system accounts to the domain that were created prior to virtualmin being installed?

Well, Virtualmin works best when used with a freshly installed system (and using the install.sh script to perform the Virtualmin install).

However, when performing a manual install, you can use Add Servers -> Import Virtual Server to pull in a domain that’s already been setup.

2) Do I really need virtualmin? My thought is yes because it’s a “one stop shop” for those other admins who don’t know much about system management. Seems like even for the 1 domain, everything is covered for user addition/email addition/spam & virus protection, right?

Well, only you can determine if you really need it, but we’re happy to answer your questions about it! When installed using the install.sh script on a new system (which we highly recommend), or after going through the Manual Installation Guide, it would indeed be able to handle adding users, and performing spam and virus scanning. Amongst other things – including managing databases, DNS, website statistics, bandwidth monitoring, disk quotas, and so forth.

3) I don’t want new user accounts to be in /home/domain/homes. Instead, I’d rather them be in /home. I created a symbolic link to take care of that for me. Any repercussions here?

If you allow Virtualmin to create the homedir in it’s default location, it shouldn’t be a problem if you really want to create a symlink to that from somewhere else, such as /home.

4) I don’t want our site running out of /home/domain/public_html, so again, another sym link to /var/www/html where I am more comfortable managing it. With it in /home/domain/public_html, I was getting a lot of 503 errors. I’m not getting them with the /var/www/html location. So, any repercussions with this sym link? Things seem to be working well this way.

Well, on a freshly installed system where Virtualmin was installed with the install.sh script, Apache’s suexec is configured to execute websites only out of /home, so you’d need to do some tweaking if you wanted to do otherwise. We generally don’t recommend this :slight_smile:

However, it doesn’t sound like you have a freshly installed system there – and if what you have there now is working, than that’s good :slight_smile:

That said, if you’re getting errors, you’re welcome to take a peek in the error logs, the logs you see in there should assist in troubleshooting the issues you’re seeing. Feel free to paste errors you’re seeing in your logs to the forums here, and we can try and offer assistance with the errors you’re getting.

-Eric