Hello,
I have recently purchased a license to virtualmin. The biggest reason I did this is to set up a reseller account for my site developers.
Having said that, I would like to enable the “configure website” capability for the reseller account in question, but I can only find “allowed capabilites” under the account plan section. Having said that, there appears to be no way to tie that account plan to the reseller in question. Am I missing something?
–jason
Jason,
After you create a reseller, you can then go back into the “Account Plans” section, open the plan in question and you should then see a new section called “Reseller Settings”.
From this new section (which is only visible after you create your first reseller), you can choose which resellers can use this plan. By default it’s set to “All Resellers”, but you can make it more restrictive if you’d like by selecting specific resellers.
Hope this helps!
Best Regards,
Peter Knowles
TPN Solutions
Email: pknowles@tpnsolutions.com
Phone: 604-782-9342
Skype: tpnsupport
Website: http://www.tpnsolutions.com
Ask me about my new support plans which include a FREE copy of Virtualmin Pro!!!
Hello,
Ok I see the where I can control what account plans can be used by what reseller. However, I just realized what it is I really want:
I want the reseller also to be able to access the apache webmin module, just like the domain owner can. I can’t find a place to explicitly allow reseller access to webmin modules.
I might be making an assumption also: I assume that reseller accounts are a superset of virtual server owners. WAs I wrong?
–jason
all right, I just found where to add additional webmin modules for resellers. But even though I have added apache to this, it’s not showing up either as its own field on the left-hand frame in virtualmin, or under the webmin/servers.
“I assume that reseller accounts are a superset of virtual server owners. WAs I wrong?”
No, you’re mostly right. Though some things behave a little differently than for the virtual server owners. But, you have a couple of options for what you’re after (that I know of off-hand…there’s probably actually more that I don’t have familiarity with.
The simplest may be to use the “Switch to Server’s Admin” in the Administration Options menu for the domain in question; they will then have exactly what the owner of the domain has (and no more; they’ll have to log back in as themselves to do reseller things when they’re done with doing virtual server owner things). This is probably an optional feature, but I don’t think I had to turn it on when I just tested, so it’s probably on by default.
I’m actually kinda surprised the Configure Website option isn’t available, by default to resellers. Somehow I thought it was (so many new features show up when you’re logged in as a reseller…I never even noticed that the Configure Website thing wasn’t among them). You should probably file a ticket about that, seeing if there’s some technical reason it wouldn’t be safe to set that up; several of the other services are available to the reseller (databases, users, DNS, etc.), so it’s somewhat inconsistent that Apache isn’t.
In the meantime, another option is to use the ACLs in Webmin, though it sounds like you almost have already done that…so I’m not sure why you aren’t seeing the module for the reseller. Webmin ACLs are how Virtualmin implements the various server configuration features (i.e. DNS zone stuff, databases, etc.) for the virtual server owners and for the resellers.
Anyway, here’s how you’d do that:
Click Webmin->Webmin->Webmin Users->reseller username
Check the Apache Web Server box. Save it. This enables the module with all privileges for the user (so if you have already granted them access to the account, maybe you want to reverse the order of the steps and modify the ACLs before enabling the module for the user).
Click on the Apache Web Server link to see the fine-grained ACLs for this module. In this module you can choose which virtual hosts the user will have access to in the module, whether they can edit the global configuration, etc. Obviously this is a potentially dangerous feature so I’d recommend disabling all access you don’t know they need.
Apache should now show up in the Servers category under Webmin for this user, as it does for root-level users (but with fewer privileges and less complexity, if you’ve disabled some of the features).
Hello Joe,
This is awesome: thanks! It is exactly what I needed to know. funny how one of the biggest issues is figuring out how virtualmin,webmin, etc all fit together, and where they leave off…
–jason
You’re absolutely right. It’s a very big system. Sometimes the power/flexibility/complexity of the thing, our biggest strength (because literally nothing on the market can do everything Virtualmin+Webmin+Usermin+plugins can do) is also our worst enemy. It’s a steep learning curve, and not everyone has the time/willingness/ability to scale it.
We have design plans to shake off some of the old legacy stuff when we branch Webmin 2.0 in a couple more months. That’ll also bring a menu redesign, some simplifications of common tasks, and removal of or hiding of uncommon tasks. I’ve also started making videos to teach people how to use all of our projects/products, and there’s a lot of activity in the Webmin documentation wiki since I migrated it to a new version of MediaWiki.
Speaking of the Webmin docs, you can find more about Webmin ACLs here: http://doxfer.webmin.com/Webmin/Webmin_Users#Editing_module_access_control
It even gets meta and allows you to delegate the ability to edit Webmin ACLs to other users, including fine-grained control over which users and which features. Webmin amazes me sometimes, despite having worked with it and on it for something like 16 years (Jamie did all the hard stuff).