Has anyone here installed virtualmin pro on an os x server?
I know that platform is not supported by the developers but I was just wondering if anyone knew if it could work (possibly with a little reconfiguring of course) and/or had done it.
Given that the original virtualmin and webmin/usermin etc. work fine on OS X I was looking at this virtualmin as a possible control panel for an OS X web server.
Any insight/experience into this would be appreciated. Thanks.
Hey, I’m just wondering the same thing as well.
I’m just wondering if anyone has Tested Virtualmin Pro on OSX Server?
Thanks
Hey guys,
It’s in the plans, though the popularity (or lack thereof) of Mac OS X on hosting servers puts it below Debian and FreeBSD in order of priority. I reckon it’ll be at least another month before we address Mac OS X officially.
Oh, yeah, if you do want to run Virtualmin Professional on Mac OS X, we’ll help. But it’s not going to be automatic, by any means, and don’t imagine for a second that the automated installation script will do anything good on a Mac.<br><br>Post edited by: Joe, at: 2007/06/24 17:30
There are at least two or three people running Virtualmin Professional on XServe systems, and a dozen or two using Virtualmin GPL on Mac OS X. The automated installer doesn’t support it–but the software itself does.
We’re releasing a Solaris version of the installer soon, which will likely be very similar to the way things will work on Mac OS X (like Solaris, Mac OS X doesn’t have packages worth speaking of, so it’ll use .wbm packages for our stuff). FreeBSD will work the same way, and will have to come before Mac OS X (there are an order of magnitude more FreeBSD users using Virtualmin, and they’re becoming restless), but by the time we’ve done two systems like that, adding a new one should be reasonably quick. As always take everything I say about OS support schedules with a huge grain of salt. They always take months longer than I expect them to. Operating Systems are stupid. All of them. 
Joe wrote:
Joe,
I installed Webmin,Usermin and Virtualmin on an iBook I am sitting on right now using the instructions from Kevin Capwell (http://www.webmin.com/osx.html) and all this went very smooth. Do you think installing Virtualmin Pro would be going smooth as well or is it somewhat more of a hassle to do?
One more question I have is were exactly the differences are using Virtualmin Pro and or using Webmin/Usermin and the GPL of Virtualmin!?
Thanks alot…
A. Pieters
ps: the video introduction on http://www.virtualmin.com/video-introduction.html - is not working anymore. Thought you might need to know…
Since I can not edit my own post (get a "Hacking attempt!" warning!?) I had to add a quick reply to my previous question.
I would also like to know, if I am running Virtualmin Pro is it still necessary to install and use Webmin or Usermin?
Thanks for your help…
A. Pieters
Virtualmin Professional is no more difficult to setup than Virtualmin GPL, except in the area of enabling the PHP4+PHP5 support, mod_fcgid, and the per-user or per-domain spam and AV configuration options (which requires procmail, clamav, spamassassin to all be installed a configured correctly). Getting these working is probably an short afternoon, if you’re familiar with UNIX software building and installation or have a source of good quality packages for them for Mac OS X.
Which brings me to the differences between GPL and Pro:
Install Scripts is the biggest difference. It allows automatic installation of 70+ applications into your websites (by both administrators and virtual server owners), including some that are monumentally hard to install (like SugarCRM) without Virtualmin’s help.
Virtualmin Professional also has a complete API rather than the simplified one of GPL, so if you’re developing apps or integrating Virtualmin into a billing or deployment system, you’ll want Professional.
The afore-mentioned switchable PHP support is awesome, especially if you use a lot of PHP scripts or develop PHP apps–you can choose to use PHP 4 for most apps (because most run best on PHP4) and develop your own under PHP 5, and the two won’t conflict. It’s actually harder than it sounds to get this working right, particularly under suexec. (Unfortunately, 50% of the problem is solved by the install process, so you’d only get half of the advantage of Virtualmin, since you’d have to do the installers job manually.)
Pro is somewhat better supported, just because Jamie and I are a limited resource with many many demands on our time, and so we prioritize support queries for customers over GPL users. But only marginally so. And, bug reports for either product are treated with equal urgency, and both are maintained in the same codebase so GPL does not get neglected.
Thanks for the heads up on the missing video. I’ll get the new one posted today.
On any system that the install.sh does not support, yes. Virtualmin is still just a module of Webmin (though a quite fancy one with more code than any other module, and a bunch of its own daemons and cronjobs and processes), so you do need Webmin installed before installing Virtualmin GPL or Professional–the install.sh takes care of that for you on supported systems (as well as installation of Apache, Postfix, Dovecot, Procmail, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP4 and PHP5, Ruby, the necessary libs for Perl and PHP to get things done, etc.). On an unsupported system, you will need to perform these installations yourself, depending on which services you plan to use (some folks never need PostgreSQL, for example).
I have it running kinda/sorta on OSX Server, and could probably get you hooked up, but understand that support around here would be rather sketchy.
Tony’s right about that one (sketchy support for platforms in use by very few users). We don’t know enough about a platform to be really, really, useful until we’ve built the installer for it and have some users banging on it. FreeBSD has accidentally become reasonably well understood by us because we have a lot of really good FreeBSD users who’ve taught us what we need to know (and I now have a FreeBSD test install). We’ll have to have a few of those same kind of bold pioneers on Mac OS X before we learn enough about it to offer good support. If being a bold pioneer isn’t in your preferred job description, you might opt to wait a while!
What if I provide a server for testing?
MY only thing is I run surgemail for my mail server. But other than that it should work right?
I will be adding another server. Really for me I run high end VPS servers for companies, and I can move my scheduled new oxserver purchase up a month, and get it for your guys to screw around with if you like. (I would like to instal a mail mirror on it though if possible.)
Tony…
that would be very much appreciated! May I ask what do you actually mean by saying "kinda/sorta"?
Like I wrote before i got webmin,usermin and virtualmin (GPL) up and running so far only on OSX workstation on my ibook. Is the installation on OSX Server much more difficult? Can you still make use of Server Admin and Workgroup Manager after the install? Hope you can help me out here…
Regards,
Tony
Ok here I am now with a Pro license of Virtualmin.
As a little "Test Setup" I had Webmin/Usermin and Virtualmin GPL installed on this OSX Server 10.4.10 Box before. That included running MySQL/ PostgreSQL/ Apache+PHP5/ BIND/ Jabber/ Postfix pretty much flawless (I think), so I am quite confident I can make this work as well.
Now here are my first questions wich sound probably rather stupid considering I had it all running before already, but I want to make the right decissions from the start so bear with me.
a) Since OSX is not a supported system for VMPro (yet), I have to install everything pretty much manually using WBMs, correct? Does anybody have any experience using DarwinPorts and their "YUM" or "RPM" package to install this?
b) Are there any more instructions about the manual install then what I found here? (http://www.virtualmin.com/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,48/id,virtualmin_administrators_guide/#manual_installation_using_.rpm_.deb_or_.wbm_packages)
c) Do I have to follow a particular order to install the WBMs?
d) In Webmin I go to Webmin > Configuration > Webmin Modules > Install
and choose "From ftp or http URL" right? How about dependencies? And should I grant access to everybody to those modules or only to the webmin root account?
Hope anybody could give me some advise on this.
Thanks alot for your help…
Tony
Hey Tony,
Awesome. We’re happy to have you on board as an Early Adopter. And we’ll look forward to working with you on the official port of Virtualmin for OS X, when the time comes (probably sometime after FreeBSD finally sees light of day).
Yes. Install from .wbm. I’d be quite suspicious of yum and rpm working well on Mac OS X without custom packages. DarwinPorts is pretty awesome (likewise fink), so I suspect we’ll probably have to rely on it when we begin porting to FreeBSD, so it’s a good place to get your non-Virtualmin specific packages.
There is the one tricky bit of recompiling Apache suexec with docroot /home, but otherwise, no serious issues I can think of.
No, that’s about the extent of it. I know it sucks. I’ve been planning to update it for ages. It’s just always seemed to take a back seat to working on the officially supported platforms. Though there are lots of hints strewn about in the FAQ and in the docs about how we set things up–which would be the right way to do things if you want to be able to smoothly switch over to the “official” install when it becomes available.
The summary of the important points would be:
MTA: Postfix
MDA: Procmail delivering to Maildir/ in $HOME
POP: Dovecot
WWW: Apache with suexec docroot /home
Apache user (apache/nobody/I dunno what on Mac OS X) is automatically added to the virtual server owner group, and home permissions set to 750 (this locks homes down nice and tight…but it doesn’t matter if you only have trusted users on your system). Since Mac OS X is based on a BSD core, this might be problematic. Secondary groups on FreeBSD are limited by default to something stupidly low like 16, whereas on modern Linux it seems to be unlimited (linked lists, look into them sometime, BSD developers…really). We can probably rebuild the FreeBSD kernel to fix this limitation, but I doubt such a rebuild is feasible for Mac OS X.
Hi Joe,
thanks for helping me out here. Much appreciated! Will do what you suggested and keep you posted on how things go.
I have one more question before I continue with my install. How important is the PARTITION part (described in the manual) if I do a manual install? Because I would like to set it up this way.
I have an XServe with 3 HDs - 1x80GB, 2x300GB (mirrored).
Now I would like to use the 80GB HD strictly for system data, user mails,… small things in general (don’t know if this is clever or not?!)
The mirrored drive(s) should be then used for hosting and should contain the users home directories.
I have no other partitions setup (yet) and would be glad if I don’t have to.
Tony
User mail should go in the users home directory in a Maildir. Your future happiness as a system administrator depends on it. I’ll also point out that most users consider their email the single most important bit of data they have. Losing it for them is viewed as the biggest crime a sysadmin can commit.
So, put mail on the mirrored disks along with the other hosting related stuff.
System can go on the 80, no problem. Back it up periodically, and you’ll be fine.
So, yes, make the big disks into /home (or whatever passes for /home on a Mac OS X server…but just remember that if it isn’t /home, you’ll need to modify a few configs, and build Apache suexec with the right suexec docroot).
Hi Joe,
thanks for the advise on the mails, will keep that in mind.
When you say “…remember that if it isn’t /home, you’ll need to modify a few configs…” do you actually mean to name the drive “home” or a directory on the drive?
Ok, now so far I have been able to install VMinPro V3.43 with Apache, Bind, Postfix, ProFTPd and MySQL. Now before I start up Apache and try to create my first virtual domain I have some more questions.
a) VMinPro allows you to run PHP4+5 simultaneously? What exactly do I have to do to set it up like that? Wich packages do I need? Could you walk me thru this process?
b) Where can I adjust the HOME directory and set it to my "home" drive/directory?
Thanks,
Tony
This is actually one of the trickier bits of what Virtualmin Pro does…and a big part of it is in the packaging (though Debian/Ubuntu have the packages already made correctly…it took ages to get it working right on CentOS and Fedora). If DarwinPorts has PHP4 and PHP5 that can co-exist without any filename or path clashes, you’re halfway there. The other half is mod_fcgid.
If you have all of those installed correctly Virtualmin should detect all of the bits and make them accessible (php4 and php5 need to be in the path, and built with fcgi and cgi support). mod_fcgid just needs to be loaded into Apache.
It’s in the Virtualmin “Module configuration”, in the “Defaults for new domains” section, option labeled “Home directory base”.
Again, this one is where lots of tricky stuff can come up. Apache suexec needs to know about it, too. Mac OS X also seems to be quite the trickster when it comes to user accounts and homes…and I don’t know enough to tell you what to look out for.
Hi Joe,
Could you be a bit more specific with this? Do I need to compile both PHP Packages as CGI? Or only one and the other as module? Both are available from Fink as well as Darwinports.
I do have another OSX development Server here running Apache and 2 virtual server. One is running PHP4 as CGI (with FastCGI) and the other runs PHP5 as module. Work perfectly fine it seems.
Thanks for your help,
Tony