Starting over.... some lessons learned

Help! (Home for newbies)
#1

G’day m8s.

I have come to suspect that having Cockpit as an additional, parallell, layer to my OS may have caused some unforeseen issues, in particular in regards to storage management and perhaps also some OS updates.

Thus I am scrapping and reinstalling one of my CentOS Servers with NO GUI and using terminal to go for Virtualmin directly, not installing anything else. (Installing CentOS Server with GUI seems to be another potential can of worms, but I don’t really get why, did not work anyhow.)

I also found a relevant alternative to SSH, HPE iLO. It wasn’t working, but after some digging and meddling I managed to get that up and running. That will be my terminal “behind” virtualmin, if necessary.

So, now all my support questions will be adressed here and not in the Cockpit site, nor the CentOS Forum since I am using a freshly installed, Grade A supported Operating System on my server

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(I will also be a lot more persistent and annoying to get my answers)

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#2

Both servers have been done for a while. They are now expecting some work to do…

Now, I have a few questions that have been posted in these forums.

All these, except perhaps DNS which is probably a readup for what goes on small networks, but still very applicable, are showstoppers with no relevant answer so far.

While I could start running sites despite lacking a couple of answers to those, I will not throw myself in a situation where someone tells me “but you should have done that before setting up the sites, now you have to redo everything if you want this or that to work”

#3

You should familiarise yourself with the backup and restore (and more specifically the partial restore) options of Virtualmin so that the next time someone says you should have done this before setting up sites, you could spin up another instance of Virtualmin, carry out the required procidure and move / restore all websites / virtual servers with a single command / script.

I like the way you are researching everything but there is no substitute for hands-on experience. You should get yourself a bit of that too.

#4

Ahh, but that fails on Backup Destination > Drive Management.

Before you can backup anything, you need to decide where your backups are going to be stored. The simplest destination is a directory on the system running Virtualmin, such as /backup, but clearly this isn’t going to be useful if the whole system dies. If you do want to backup to local files, at least make sure they are on a different hard drive than the home containing your /home directory.

I have a topic on that.

#5

The questions regarding FS management and system monitoring really have nothing to do with Virtualmin as such.

For FS, read up on mounts. The easiest is to mount the desired partition during install time, so that the big RAID you want is mounted under /home. Otherwise you can do it later also, creating an entry in /etc/fstab.

As calport mentioned in another thread of yours, Linux as default sends notifications to root. Under /etc/aliases you need to set root: your@mailbox
Then you will receive entries from syslog, mdadm, whatever. For other kinds of monitoring it depends on what you are after. Can you be more specific as to what you want?

Clustering is a vague word. In Virtualmin you can easily setup a DNS cluster f.ex., but clustering anything else is a bit more complex. Best solution is backup, backup, backup. Then you can easily restore stuff if/when the primary server borks.

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#6

This thread is not about the other threads, but since you post just lets mix everything together in a nice little goo…? Or mashed guleböj perhaps…

When I ask at CentOS Forum about Drive management and mention I run Virtualmin they shun my question. I have been doing partitions and logical volumes for 20 years locally, in Windows and FreeNAS and sometimes on local drives using GParted, my issue is not about understanding the logic, my issue is about understanding what the Virualmin, or rather Webmin, interface tells me and how to use it.

In regards to system monitoring I have monitoring sendíng me e-mails from my RAID on another machine (SuperMicro chipsets) and from my NAS among other stuff… those were extremely easy to set up, you enter the mailserver credentials and address, make sure the ports are open and specify a mailaddress. Where do I do that in Webmin? Why do I need to run a mailserver for a simple monitoring (I may actually be wrong about that but right now I just dont know).

Clustering is to me mirroring two machines, failover. There is an interface for it, but hardly any documentation… Since my servers for this are identical it should be relatively easy to setup.

#7

I have, that is why I have reinstalled my servers and seeking answers before wrecking them for the fourth time. Not without documentation to fall back to. I am done guessing. Frankly I am getting rather fedup with this shitty Linux way of having 5 different methods to accomplish almost the same thing. But I like Virtualmin and Webmin, they are exactly what I want to run on these servers and to handle what I plan for them.

I am a process and documentation person and I hate quick fixes.

#8

Why did you install a GUI on your server as it has a lot of overhead (RAM). I assume you mean x windows and some desktop manager like xfce, fluxbox. I am just curious.

#9

I didn’t… ?

Thing is I was after a web GUI all along (with 2FA) because any desktop GUI (x and alike, Gnome, KDE, etc) will most likely force me towards a VNC Remote Desktop, or a commercial solution, and VNC is just not good enough.

#10

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