I can’t say enough positive things about Virtualmin. I’m a recent convert from cPanel and while the learning curve has been steep, the experience has been rewarding.
Have been thinking about putting together a few tutorials. I’ve had some success getting some fairly sophisticated applications running on a Virtualmin server. e.g. Nextcloud AIO, Metabase, & PaperX.
My questions are:
– is this something that the Virtualmin team believes would be positive, and
– is it better to create the tutorials on my own website or here in the forum?
With huge respect to the Virtualmin team, the documentation & posts on this forum are often “above the paygrade” of many users. So my thought is creating a step-by-step walk-through for some of the newbies might be helpful.
We love it when folks write up what they’ve learned, about Virtualmin, Webmin, or anything else. The only time it’s a thing I might get grumpy about is if it’s misleading in potentially dangerous ways. But, if you post about it here, I can probably find time to skim it to make sure nothing too scary is being recommended and suggest corrections if so.
Where you post is entirely up to you! You’re welcome to post on your website and post a link here, but also you can post long posts here and include screenshots and such. The forum supports Markdown, so it can look nice, if you want it to.
We’re not going to discourage whatever way you to want to try to help newbies.
(Hey Joe) so I have started working on these tutorials. Although I did want to create them here, I could not find a way to save work as a draft. And I craft these things over the course of a few days. So for that reason alone, I ended up with a WordPress site.
I have the first several tutorials completed. They can be seen here: https://bblaze.xyz/
I have the next few already started. They should be complete in the next week or two.
But… What made me write you right now is the shocking cost of the inferior competitors product. I was looking at consolidating servers, just took this screenshot.
While I agree that the price of cpanel is high, and the license model agressively pushes providers to oversell their servers, I don’t think it’s necessarily an inferior product.
I sold and maintained cpanel hosting for a big provider for 2 years, and what I can say is that it is primarily intended for ease of use which you have to pay for.
Comparing the two from the perspective of an ordinary user- cpanel is a kiddie bike with a set of training wheels, while virtualmin is more like a mountain bike.
Comparing the two from the perspective of an experienced sysadmin - cpanel is a kiddie bike with 100 sets of training wheels, useful if you only want to travel in a straight line.
WHM is a bit advanced, but still intended for ease of use.
The difference is that for virtualmin you mostly pay with time and knowledge to set everything up as you want it, but with cpanel/whm you pay money for someone else to take care of it for you and streamline the experience. Cpanel is an excellent solution for it’s own target audience mostly made up of novices.
This is not a bad thing, cpanel makes web hosting extremely accessible with very little knowledge required. I’m happy cpanel is a thing, but it’s not intended for me. After investing a considerable amount of time learning virtualmin, most of my maintenance tasks are automated
I’ve been reading some of your tutorials, @imfbsbn, and I appreciate the effort you put into making Virtualmin more approachable to newbies. However, I must admit I found your piece on disabling DNS a bit perplexing.
The goal of a tutorial is to deepen the reader’s understanding of a product – guiding them through its features, offering best practices, and showing how to make the most of its capabilities. Readers interested in Virtualmin are likely hoping to learn how to configure and manage DNS within the platform, not simply disable it in favour of external services.
I completely understand the convenience of using registrar-provided nameservers, but I believe a more valuable approach would be to walk readers through setting up nameservers and configuring DNS directly in Virtualmin. This would not only help them build confidence in managing their own infrastructure but also highlight Virtualmin’s full potential.
Disabling DNS feels more like a footnote than a full tutorial. Perhaps investing time in areas where Virtualmin can shine – features less commonly covered in forums – would resonate more with readers looking to harness the platform’s power. A guide on fine-tuning DNS, security best practices, or optimising Virtualmin for performance could add significant value.
Alot of admins don’t use the DNS as there Registrar will give them one or they use Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare or like me use the VPS providers DNS (Vultr).
I disable in the template, so don’t even need to do it per Virtual Server.
I don’t think that mentioned in the docs either and the doc are very limited, I would stick to the Virtuamin docs for the most part.
Given how many people don’t disable features they aren’t using, anything that gets people to look at the damned Features and Plugins page and think about what they’re using and what they aren’t is OK in my book. Disabling the DNS feature is simple as heck (it’s one checkbox), but lots of people don’t do it.
DNS is the most common case where people lie to Virtualmin and then run into problems or confusing behaviors later. Like, if Virtualmin thinks it is managing DNS, it thinks it can create Let’s Encrypt wild card certs or perform DNS validation if web validation fails. But, that’s not possible if DNS is hosted elsewhere and Virtualmin isn’t managing it. The resulting errors confuse a lot of people.
If I were to create a tutorial simply advising users to disable features A to Z, what’s the point of having a tutorial at all? For that matter, why use that solution/sofware/application/younameit in the first place?
Might be a tad exaggerated, but I hope it highlights my perspective. I’m not questioning DNS handling itself – I completely understand the rationale behind disabling it in certain cases. I’m just curious as to why a tutorial would broadly say, “Turn this off, and you’ll have fewer problems”.
If I were a (new) *min user opening a tutorial, I’d expect to learn how to better utilise the features, not just how to switch them off and move on. To me, that’d be less of a tutorial and more of a checklist at best.
I see what you mean, I don’t see his point about its being better to use externally suppied DNS (even though I do). If Virtuamin IP can’t be reach (or mail server has a issue) for some technical reason, a external or internal running dns doesn’t fix that problem. It will all still start working once the IP can be reached.
Redundancy in DNS is no a issue as it use it be.
surely that is why you run at least 2 dns servers rather than just one ? For me I stick to the virtualmin/webmin documentation as 3rd party tutorials are based on 1 person’s experience with the product, which may be different to what another person is seeing … for example from the tutorial
Well not really, its just the way I always did it, old ticks as they say. I came from a time when the internet connectivity isn’t as reliable as it is today ( I use to run dial-up modems out of my spare room).
I should really move to using the virtualmin dns as it would quicker to set up dmarc dkim and spf.
Your point is well taken. I would ask that you consider many users might not be as familiar with both DNS records and name servers as yourself. For these people setting up two NS records pointing to the same server is goofy and needlessly complicated. Further, IMHO, they are not gaining anything by hosting DNS records on a $12/mo server.
I believe the text within the tutorial makes it clear that this advice is only for simpletons (like me.)
I’m not talking on my behalf. I’m talking on behalf of newbies. I reckon one of the prime reasons to operate a VPS is to have full control over everything.
If a new user wants to know how to set-up their own DNS (or mail server or, or, or), they most probably search for a tutorial. If you tell them don’t do but rely on your provider’s capabilities, you a) put them off and b) make them wonder if Virtualmin might be the right option.
You don’t feed their curiosity and allow them to gain knowledge through your tutorial but keep them on the same knowledge base as they had initially when hoping to find answers in your tutorial.
When I read:
Have been thinking about putting together a few tutorials. I’ve had some success getting some fairly sophisticated applications running on a Virtualmin server. e.g. Nextcloud AIO, Metabase, & PaperX.
With huge respect to the Virtualmin team, the documentation & posts on this forum are often “above the paygrade” of many users. So my thought is creating a step-by-step walk-through for some of the newbies might be helpful.
That set my expectations high hoping that you would create easy-to-understand tutorials on the more complex topics. Please don’t take it personal but I doubt that your tutorials will add any benefit on top of the already existing and well-written *min documentation if you continue to handle topics the same way as you did with DNS management.
