Virtualmin: Why not?

General Discussion
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I’m setting up a new server and I’m evaluating various web panels. I don’t want cPanel because is too expensive for what I need. I have some experience with CWP. It is easy to use and install, but I managed to completely crash it by installing an innocent SSL certificate. It took me 5 hours to get it back online. Actually I’m looking for a web panel which will not allow me to crash it by doing something from its interface. This server will be a multi-domain mail server with big mailboxes(>50GB), FTP server and storage for backups.

If you had some bad experiences with Virtualmin, please share it with me.

Thanks!

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Good luck with that. There is no such thing as software that will NOT do what you tell it to do because it realizes you have no idea what you’re doing.

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I have some 30gb mailboxes … that’s down to your mail software to look after, and not an interface as such, however it could be said that if you play with settings in any interface you don’t understand you are asking for trouble.
All software has it’s problems I have never come across a package that works all the time in all situations
With webmin/virtualmin I have had a few minor problems but most of those have been down to not understanding the underlying system that I was configuring with the interface.
I did try out plesk … didn’t like the interface, cyberpanel is no where near powerfull to run any sort of web hosting and does some rather weird things on installing

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Welcome to the forums, @EmeyWhatson!

I’ve been using Virtualmin since before I was a member here, which I just realized I signed up for more than 11 years ago!
I have migrated, upgraded, moved and generally stirred about quite heavily and apart from a few small issues now and then (mostly made by me trying things) it’s been working really well.
Sure, there are a few oddities, but hell, after dealing with cPanel and Plesk at my previous workplace for 5 years I quickly learned that I would never move my own stuff there.

As for the issues that do arise, you will mostly get fairly quick help here on the forums and the devs are quite responsive here.

TL;DR: Excellent product that works!

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All I can say is this: if it is installed as per the official documentation, it works flawlessly. There are many incorrect and outdated guides on the net which should be avoided and if a new user of Virtualmin is able to avoid those, we’ll begun is half done.

Virtualmin GPL can be used to offer web hosting services without bearing burden of the monthly charge of cPanel or having to deal with the (use suitable adjective of your choice) user interface of CWP or even having a shotgun marriage with one of the singleton OSs that most web hosting control panels have arbitrarily chosen to commit to.

If you go after Virtualmin and try and break it, it will break. If you make it do something stupid, then it will do something stupid to your system. But if you accept the sensible defaults that the Virtualmin system offers when it is freshly installed, it will serve your web hosting requirements for years on end with little or no effort on your part.

Virtualmin is a fully functional tool for offering shared web hosting services. Use it to:

  1. create domains / virtual servers for web hosting
  2. create / delete email addresses for the domains that are hosted
  3. manage FTP accounts for the domains that are hosted
  4. create / delete databases for the domains that are hosted
  5. Install / uninstall the limited scripts (WordPress etc) that the GPL version of Virtualmi offers or the wider range of scripts that the Pro version of Virtualmin offers

Virtualmin will serve you well if you are a newbie and limit yourself to the five activities listed above. Additionally, if you know what you are doing (and exactly what you are doing) Virtualmin + Webmin offer you the flexibility to configure your system any which way you want via an easy to use GUI.

In a professional web hosting environment, Virtualmin and Usermin can be used by your customers to mange their hosting account. These users have a lower level of access and there is nothing that they are permitted to do via Virtualmin and Usermin that will negatively impact or harm the server. I mention this specifically @EmeyWhatson in context of your comment about an idiot-proof environment.

That’s Virtualmin in a nutshell. I urge you to try it out, I am sure you will enjoy using it.

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As you said, if Cpanel didnt kick Centos to the curb which was a idiotic way in a business sense, and why they probably had to raise the price The problem becomes when they supports Ubuntu which my 10 dedicated server run on and so does around 200.000 of our customers worldwide. We haven’t had many places to go so we have had to do it the old school with postfix admin and PowerDNS Admin, PowerDNS and Knot is and will be the only self provided dns software that is free and CLOSED off so no one see you or your customers. Bind all the others are slow, do not run their own resolvers and if you put google or Cloudflare up as resolvers well goodbye to your customers privacy, Its a reason those 2 are the biggest hosting and cloud comppanies, we did a test, opened up one server with fake domains and 65% of them got offers fro Google or sub providers.

We have gone trough all Panels that eixists, I loved Virtualadmin, just like I like whms but not the damn cpanel on top. But since no one beside Cpanel do provide Powerdns and all their technology which includes EDNS now which Icann is and ITEF, EU and everyone has approved with open arms it will be game over. Alma, Cloudlinux or what they call themselves today, half the server farms and hosting company runs on Debian/ubuntu with ether open or freebsd in front. And now that Plesk and cpanel has same owner it do not look good for the rest and they support Powerdns completely and has actually paid attention dough they had have their share of mistakes. But I never liked Centos nor RedHat. Its not quick or flexible enough.

SO please let me know if Virtualladmin support the master versions of Powerdns dnsdist and recursors like even REDHAT and Ubuntus virtual platforms does. And is included in hippo instead of bind which is done same with outbound and Damascus.

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I’ve never used PowerDNS, or even looked at it, but we have support for it that used to be sponsored by one of our bigger customers. I don’t know the current state of it. It would probably need to be sponsored again for it to become a very actively maintained thing, since it’s not gonna be something most people use. (I guess we could also make it a paid-for add-on to fund development, as well, rather than needing one big customer to pay a couple/few thousand a year to keep it going.)

But, the code’s there. If you’re technically savvy enough to know PowerDNS is the only DNS server that will work for you, you’re probably technically savvy enough to do some development on it. I don’t know how much work it needs to bring it up to date or to make it work with whatever features you need…and, since I have never once installed or managed PowerDNS I won’t be able to help. But, if you make PRs against that repo, we’ll review and merge them, assuming they look reasonable (and we’ll push new packages to our repos, if someone is maintaining it). It’s not a lot of code…so, probably not too difficult to make it work and keep it working.

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Well, the Interface which is free ofc today and works with all functions OF PowerDNS is this: https://github.com/liewebagency/PowerDNS-Admin

Here you have the simple repos for well all Linux Distro they really support. https://repo.powerdns.com

You can choose to either use Sqlite, Postgresql or Mysql as Backends or LUA and BIND dough using bind isn’t particular efficient. The Panel above dive into the Powerdns where you can make all the changes. With their regular pdnsutil you can do more CLI things or just edit the /etc/pdns.conf file.

If you want to use the SQL alternative they have laid it all out the tables and everything, just to import it into the dbl.

When it comes to DNSSEC choose https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/dnssec/profile.html

DNSKEY and RRSIG Resource Records for ECDSA

ECDSA public keys consist of a single value, called “Q” in FIPS
186-3. In DNSSEC keys, Q is a simple bit string that represents the
uncompressed form of a curve point, “x | y”.

The ECDSA signature is the combination of two non-negative integers,
called “r” and “s” in FIPS 186-3. The two integers, each of which is
formatted as a simple octet string, are combined into a single longer
octet string for DNSSEC as the concatenation “r | s”. (Conversion of
the integers to bit strings is described in Section C.2 of FIPS
186-3.) For P-256, each integer MUST be encoded as 32 octets; for
P-384, each integer MUST be encoded as 48 octets.

The algorithm numbers associated with the DNSKEY and RRSIG resource
records are fully defined in the IANA Considerations section. They
are:

o DNSKEY and RRSIG RRs signifying ECDSA with the P-256 curve and
SHA-256 use the algorithm number 13.

o DNSKEY and RRSIG RRs signifying ECDSA with the P-384 curve and
SHA-384 use the algorithm number 14.

Blockquote
Hence IETF standard ITEF EDNS dnsec/TSIG
IANA Supports, Icann has been for long time

Icann, IANA and all root and power nics has Greenlight full EDNS only and IPV6 within well as soon as possible. US has pushed trough a law as well since most are out of IPv4 and well, it is easy to masquerade and use ipv6 as proxy to hide the real ip4 which is why we use NAT ipv6 shows outside.
You have 3 options https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/backends/bind.html#bind-performance

So it is 3 ways to run it, with Master - Slave, Auth and sql as backends which they provide ALL you need PowerDNS offers full master and slave semantics for replicating domain information. Furthermore, PowerDNS can benefit from native database replication.

As we can see after their new re-model together with Knot, NlLabs the 3 who worked together and made EDNS a reality no SQL backend can do all BUT auto serial Example of MySql as Backend. Where you have schema and all you need, you can mirror/synch the dns over multiple servers so its always up. We have 5 nameservers running on ipv6 on different locations and 4 resolvers on difference locations.

But only. to use BIND /w Sqlite gives you all incl auto serial which means you with that only need Powerdns master and Bind/Sqlite to do everything, backend, master-slave and dynamic dns, I also noticed that the speed of Bind with Sqlite which they have tuned for performance that the performance for Powerdns with Bind/Sqlite is from doc.powerdns.com

Blockquote On launch, the BIND backend first parses the named.conf to determine which zones need to be loaded. These will then be parsed and made available for serving, as they are parsed. So a named.conf with 100.000 zones may take 20 seconds to load, but after 10 seconds, 50.000 zones will already be available. While a domain is being loaded, it is not yet available, to prevent incomplete answers.

Blockquote

I nootied that they made a chance in there pwoerdnns 4.3V now where you can run bind with Generic SQLite 3 backend — PowerDNS Authoritative Server documentation No other DB does what this db do.

So there are many options, you can either modify the panel on top to fit or one called powerdns MANAGER which goes inside the database for changes which can be challenging. And there are many many more run pdnsutil and see the options it gives and its possible to make a php script to execute all of it, Look at Proxlor they run only on Powerdns, amazing panel but not so maintained

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Please stay on topic, or start a new thread. This isn’t a PowerDNS fan thread. If you like it, great. But I didn’t know mentioning that Virtualmin had some PowerDNS support was going to start a whole epic story about it. :wink:

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Its was a easy way of explaining the many way it is to put it together. And what is coming, I like all sort of dns systems as I said knot, NSD which the dutch runs for .nl open source who also put out a ldns dns over https. Lightweight but effective. Point is that some are for easy use with not much traffic, some a bunch and other whole registries, Im sorry for the info, you may just delete it if you want, But regarding to your plugin, I dont know if that is run on a db ? If so it should just be to update their SQL schemas and you should be good to go. I didnt find this as an option when I installed virtual admin btw, Can you connect multiple servers together with virtuladmin or one admin for each server ?

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