Here I thought I’d outline just some of the problems I am having with Webmin at the moment, in the hope that they will actually be addressed by somebody, because I can’t find anything online about them except for dead-end solutions for people who actually had the problem(s) I do!
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Domain setup (which might affect quotas, bandwidth etc.)
Basically, I wanted to host multiple virtual servers using Virtualmin. BUT I wanted to give each user a subdomain, attached to the main site address, e.g. user1.mainsite.tld. I didn’t like the idea of using sub-servers in Virtualmin, because that would mean having a domains folder with separate directories. So instead I decided to make a NEW VIRTUAL SERVER for each subdomain. There is also a separate virtual server for the mainsite.tld.
I have bought the mainsite.tld from GoDaddy.com, and I use CNAMEs to point each subdomain to my dedicated server’s ip-address. Apache then does the rest with Named Virtual Hosts, and knows which user’s home directory each subdomain points to. -
Bandwidth
Bandwidth for each domain is being incorrectly calculated, for some unknown reason. Webalizer is also way off the mark. The most interesting part of this bizarre fact, is that when I create the domain on a certain date, Virtualmin tells me (in the domain settings area) when I created it - which is normal, but the bandwidth says ‘from <a date>’ that is nearly a month before i even setup the virtual server!! For example, I recently built a server on 18 Feb 2008. But the bandwidth usage is reported ‘since 23 Jan 2008’! I don’t know if this is intentional, but it would be nice if it reported it from when i created the virtual server, or from a date that i specify. I know that it is possible to choose ‘by date’ etc, but that is no use really, because the bandwidth recorded was 146GB in one day (on the first day after I created the virtual server), way off the mark since I knew that this was impossible; the files transferred don’t match this apart from the fact that when I checked the Apache logs, a download manager was used and split parts were made. I did try adding up the data, and it did seem to pan out to 196GB, but if so, this means that bandwidth is calculated according to the logs, so even if i start a 4GB file download, and stop it after, say, 1 second, the bandwidth usage will be 4GB? -
Quotas / Ownership calculations
This is a bizarre one, and I really don’t know how this was overlooked (if it was). If a user (by user, I mean a subdomain user with their own home directory) accesses their site via FTP, and create a new folder or file, that folder/file will by default have the ownership and permissions of that user, correct? But let’s say the user wants to transfer a bulk load of files remotely to their server, say a large zipped backup of a database, they will need to remotely transfer it using either PHP or a Perl script. In this case, Apache takes over, and when the file is transferred, it has the ownership and group of ‘apache’ (or whatever Apache is set to run as).
The effect of this, it seems, is that Webmin only calculates the user’s disk quota only by taking files with the user’s group ownership into account. If the files are not owned by that user, then they are not taken into account.
In light of this problem, I am thinking that perhaps I got a 146GB bandwidth reading because ownerships were being calculated from apache’s user group and added onto the current domain users account - because I had to mount a directory to their home directory from outside…not sure.
Finally, I have to mention that some of these problems were most likely fixed, but I upgraded Webmin to the latest version (as opposed to a fresh install).
Please help me if you can, and do tell me if I am the one making the mistakes (e.g the domain setup).