Virtual Server Owners Guide - A brief guide for virtual server account holders, covering logging in, uploaded and managing web content, and creating mailboxes.
Resellers Guide - A guide for Virtualmin resellers, covering creation and management of virtual servers.
Mail and FTP Users - A guide for Virtualmin mailbox account holders, covering logging into Usermin, and basic usage of mail features.
To access the Usermin Webmail system, browse to port 20000 on your domain name, using the HTTPS protocol.
For example:
https://www.domain.tld:20000
Login using your mailbox username and password.
Usermin provides a left-hand menu, and a right-hand content pane.
In the left-hand menu, there is a Mail tab and a Usermin tools tab. The Mail tab includes a list of available mail folders, a search box, and links for folder management, address book, mail preferences, change passwords, system information, and switch user.
The right pane displays either the active folder, mail message, or Usermin tool that has been selected in the left-hand menu.
A guide for Virtualmin Reseller account holders. Documents domain creation, editing, maintenance, and script installation.
Virtualmin, combined with Webmin and Usermin, provides a complete virtual hosting administration system, allowing for four tiers of operation, "administrator", "reseller", "domain owner", "mail user". This guide is for the second, or reseller, tier of the system. The reseller account type has the ability to create, update and delete domains, manage email addresses within the domains under her control, and optionally install scripts and monitor bandwidth and disk usage. This guide covers only Virtualmin's extensive virtual hosting features that are available to Reseller account holders.
Any web browser can be used with Virtualmin, though some themes use advanced browser features that work better in browsers with good CSS support (Firefox, Safari, Opera and Konqueror all fit this description, while Internet Explorer currently does not). It is even possible to use a text-mode browser like lynx or links to use Virtualmin.
To login to Webmin (because Virtualmin is part of Webmin, one logs into Webmin and browses to the Virtualmin module), browse to the address of your server using the HTTPS protocol on port 10000. For example, if your Virtualmin server was running on hostname hosting1.virtualmin.com, you would enter https://hosting1.virtualmin.com:10000 in the URL field of your browser.
Your administrator will provide you a username and password to use for logging in.
Within most Webmin modules, there will be a help link in the upper left corner of the page. Clicking it will open a help window with documentation about the specific page you are on. Most options in Webmin can be clicked on to get a popup help window describing that specific option. The Virtualmin module has extensive online help in addition to this manual, so if any option or feature confuses you, you don't have to find the appropriate section in this guide. Clicking on it will popup the help window with help specific to the item you clicked.
At the bottom of the left-hand menu, you'll find a Logout link. Clicking this link will, obviously, log you out of Webmin.
To create a new virtual server, click the Create Server* menu heading in the left menu bar, and then click the *Create Virtual Server item.
A new page full of options will be displayed in the right content window. We'll assume that most default settings are appropriate for our domain for the sake of simplicity in this example, but later on we'll dive into the depths of custom Server Templates, skeleton directories and customization of the default settings for new domains. After a fresh install, Virtualmin has pretty reasonable defaults for the vast majority of environments, though, so we can create a domain easily and expect it to be useful right away.
image:images/first-domain.png["Screenshot of Virtualmin Create Domain page"]
In the above, I have filled in everything that is needed to create a domain with most features enabled. I only specified a few options: Domain name, Description, Contact email address, and Administration password. The rest I've left at their default values. If you aren't sure what a particular option means, click on the name of the option, and a help window will pop up to describe the option. Every option in Virtualmin has a popup help link, and most pages have a general overview help link in the upper left corner of the page.
You must always provide a domain name for a virtual server account (there are ways to create websites for users without domains using Virtualmin, but that is a much simpler problem and isn't the focus of Virtualmin).
The description is simply a short description of the domain. It is free text, and does not impact any aspect of the virtual server, so it can be just about anything. It will appear as the "Real Name" of the domain user in the Users and Groups module.
Here, you select what email address should receive notifications about this domain, including the creation email that lists the available services, provides login instructions, etc. If you choose to generate the password later on, this may be the only way for the user to find out the password, so it may be appropriate to choose Other address.. and enter the users preferred address in the field provided.
You can choose to have a password generated randomly, which is a good idea from a security standpoint. Virtualmin will generate a reasonably long (8+ characters) random password, which will be sent to the user via email. They can, of course, immediately change the password when they login.
All of the other options can generally be left alone. We'll discuss many of them in more detail later on, but for now, let's just assume that the defaults are perfect.
When you click the Create Server button, Virtualmin will spin into action...it will create the new user and group, add Apache virtual host configuration, add a zone and domain to BIND, add virtual domain configuration to Postfix, create new databases and users in MySQL and PostgreSQL, configure SpamAssassin and ClamAV for the domain, configure log rotation and Webalizer log reports, (woo! I'm getting tired just talking about it...that Virtualmin works hard so you don't have to) and configures any optional Virtualmin Plugin features, like Mailman mailing lists or SubVersion revision control repositories.
Now you can return to the Virtualmin main page and you'll see your new domain in the list of available domains. Clicking on the domain allows you to edit all of the options we just configured, so you can always return to the domain to alter the settings (be careful with that feature, however, as turning off a feature may delete user data...Virtualmin will warn you before destructive changes).
The domain owner can also login using the new domain account and the password you assigned (or that was randomly generated).
Bandwidth monitoring is a standard feature of Virtualmin, allowing the administrator to limit bandwidth usage or simply notify users and administrators when a domain is approaching and has surpassed their allotted network bandwidth.
To find out bandwidth usage of your domains, click the Bandwidth Usage link in the left-hand menu (if unavailable, bandwidth monitoring has not been enabled for your account).
Virtualmin Professional provides the ability for domain owners, resellers, and administrators to easily install dozens of PHP and Perl scripts within a Virtualmin domain. It also allows for one or more scripts to be installed automatically on server creation, based on the selec ted Server Template for the new domain. New Script Installer scripts can also easily be writ ten using the Install Scripts to add support for internally developed applications.
To install a new script select the domain you'd like to install for in the dropdown menu at the top of the left-hand menu, and then click Install Scripts. Then, click the radio button next to the script you'd like to install, and optionally select a version (often both a stab
le and development version are provided). Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page and clic
k the Show Install Options button.
On this page, you'll be able to select the database to use from existing databases, optionally create a new database, and choose the name of the subdirectory to install the script under.
Clicking Install Now will then install the script and setup the database with the appropr
iate items. Some scripts don't need a database, and so the database-related option will be unavailable.
Virtualmin allows you, the domain virtual server account holder, to manage your website files, mailboxes, databases, DNS entries, and install scripts.
Virtualmin is the administrative interface, or control panel, you will use for most of the administrative functions you'd like to accomplish. You can open your account using any browser (modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Opera are recommended), by browsing to port 10000 on the server address using the HTTPS protocol.
For example, if your domain were virtualmin.com, you could access it at the URL: https://virtualmin.com:10000
Enter your username and password, as provided by your system administrator.
When you login to Virtualmin, you'll see a left-hand menu bar and a right-hand content page, as shown in the diagram below:
image:/images/first-look.png
The left menu contains all of the options available for your domain. Some shown here might not be available in your menu, it depends on the options available for your domain.
The right content page opens with a summary of your virtual server data, such as number of domains, disk usage, mailboxes etc.
There are several ways to upload content to your Virtualmin account. You can use any of them or all of them, based on your needs and skills.
The preferred method for sending many files, directories of files, or very large files, is the SSH protocol. SSH is a fast and secure protocol, that allows you to safely login, upload and download files, and manage existing files. SCP is the name for file transfer commands that work using the SSH protocol. Likewise, FTP over SSH (sometimes also called FISH, or SFTP) is a mechanism for providing FTP-like service over a secure link.
There are many graphical and textmode clients for the SSH protocol available for free and commercially.
We'll cover where to find SSH-capable clients for your Operating System, and we'll provide a few examples of using them to manage the files in your Virtualmin account.
pscp
The best free command line SCP client is called pscp.exe and it can be found at:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
It is related to PuTTY, which is a very nice free SSH client.
After you've placed the pscp.exe file into your system path, using it is quite simple. In a DOS shell, simply enter a command like the following:
C:\> pscp.exe myfile.htm user@domain.tld:/home/user/public_html
Then, enter your password at the prompt, and hit enter. This will copy the file "myfile.htm", located in the current directory, to the /home/user/public_html folder on the Virtualmin server.
Filezilla
A free graphical FTP client that supports FTP over SSH is Filezilla. http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/|Filezilla Home Page.
To Configure Filezilla:
Your admin user will be able to use a graphical FTP style program or Dreamweaver to upload their pages now.
WinSCP
Another good free graphical FTP over SSH option is WinSCP:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php|WinSCP Home Page
After installation, simply start it up. It will ask for your login information. Enter the details as provided by your system administrator for hostname, username, and password. Then click Login.
Now you'll see a window displaying the files in your Virtualmin account home directory. You can copy files into your public_html directory to make them accessible via the webserver, or into the cgi-bin directory, if the files are executable CGI scripts.
scp
Mac OS X includes the free OpenSSH SCP client, called simply scp. Usage is just like Linux and UNIX scp clients. Open a Terminal and execute a command like the following:
$ scp myfile.htm user@domain.tld:/home/usr/public_html
After this hit enter, and then enter your password.
Cyberduck
Cyberduck is a popular Mac-native Open Source graphical FTP client that supports SCP, SFTP, FTP over SSL, WebDAV/SSL, and Amazon S3 secure connections.
It also integrates very cleanly with most favorite external OSX text editors, like SubEthaEdit, BBEdit, TextWrangler, Text-Edit Plus, TextMate, mi, Smultron, JeditX, CSSEdit, CotEditor and Tag, skEdit, and PageSpinner.
Download it for free from here:
[http://cyberduck.ch_ Cyberduck Home Page]
scp
Like Mac OS X, all Linux distributions include a complete SSH implementation, including the scp command. Run the following to copy a file named "myfile.htm" to the domain.tld server using the username "user":
$ scp myfile.htm user@domain.tld:/home/usr/public_html
After this hit enter, and then enter your password.
gftp
gftp is a popular Gnome-based graphical FTP client that also supports scp and FTP over SSH protocol connections.
Download it for free from here:
[http://gftp.seul.org/ gftp Home Page]
Or, preferably, simply install the package provided by your OS vendor. gftp is very popular and is available from the majority of Linux distributions, so you don't need to build it yourself.
Your FTP client should be configured to connect to yourdomain.tld, or, if DNS has not yet propagated, you could use the IP address or temporary hostname given to you by your administrator (which will be of the form youdomain.hostdomain.tld). You will use the domain account name and password given to you by your system administrator. Note that, by default, only the domain account has FTP access to the website data for your account, and additional users are only email users.