I wrote a book below and decided to put the conclusion on top…
I am interested in the impacts of having two year old free Webmin and Virtualmin software which has been partially dismantled by various Sys Admins who only do command line. Can I update without a big crash, do I even need to bother if all is working? We have it setup so there is no direct access to the login screen to avoid bots hitting us with password crunchers.
What would it cost to have a consultant look over our installation, update everything, and possibly add modules that would help me as the owner do monitoring and basic admin?
How do I know a consultant really knows his or her stuff? I have been doing web sites for five years and have hired scores of specialists and most (9 of 10) talk big and fail to deliver. The guy who installed our Webmin sold us on it and dropped out the minute he installed it and realized he was over his head when it came to getting it to work.
I think there is a lot more value I can get from these tools that this community has built.
What would buying Pro do for me? I just don’t know what to do from this point?
Background:
We have a Debian box and a great system admin (on-call basis). Our web system currently consists of two Drupal mulitsites. One with about 150 domains on one IP and nameserver and another 50 domains ready to go up on another IP and Nameserver.
Standard cPanel was too limiting for the custom Drupal modules we have so we were directed to Webmin and Virtualmin two years ago. I have managed to poke around and make use of these graphical tools; but I was using cPanel for years and these tools are not for Linux dummies like me.
My Sys Admin would prefer we axe Webmin and Virtualmin and run command line, but this would leave me dead as I have no time in life to learn more than child level Linux and we run a nonprofit with pocket change so money is not piled up for sys admin work.
I am concerned that our Webmin and Virtualmin are now outdated. Many modules were removed by various admins who also hated the unknown variables presented by such tools and some frankly were very helpful for me to monitor things and make simple changes and additions.