Installation Troubleshooting

Most installation problems are related to network connectivity, package management, or attempting to run the install script on an unsupported operating system or architecture.

Installation "Freezes" and Never Completes

Check the virtualmin-install.log. It is possible that your package manager is configured to use a local CD ROM device for packages, and the disk is unavailable. Another possibility is that connections to one or more repositories are timing out, and causing the system to install packages very slowly.

If your system has low memory (512MB or less), things may take much longer to install than normal, as the package manager (yum or apt) may grow larger than physical memory and push the process into swap memory. So, installation on small VPS systems may take an hour or more.

Third Party Repositories and Package Conflicts

If your package manager is configured to use non-OS package repositories, or if you have installed alternative versions of packages before installation, conflicts are likely to occur during installation. If you plan to use non-OS standard packages (other than those provided by Virtualmin repositories), they should be installed after installation of Virtualmin, and you should add an exclude directive to the yum or apt-get configuration in order to insure similar conflicts do not happen in the future.

Also note that if you are using non-OS standard packages, you may need to configure the relevant Webmin module to make it aware of the location of the configuration files.

Note that if your Linux distribution was installed by your ISP (such as with a VPS image), you may want to verify that no additional repositories were setup.

/tmp directory is mounted noexec

If you have run any so-called "hardening scripts" on your system before running install.sh, your /tmp directory may be mounted noexec. It is always best to run the install script on a freshly installed supported Operating System, though this particular issue can be resolved. The install script cannot complete if this is the case, and /tmp will need to be remounted to allow executables.

To do that:

# mount -o remount,exec /tmp

If you wish to switch back to your original settings after installation, you can use this command to reset the noexec option:

# mount -o remount,noexec /tmp

ClamAV-related errors

ClamAV is updated frequently by the upstream developers. Your OS repository may not have the latest version, which causes ClamAV to issue very scary warnings. These warnings are non-fatal, and can generally be safely ignored.

If you are using CentOS, the ClamAV packages come from our repositories, and are updated every few weeks, as time and testing schedules allow. So, if you see this error, it will go away with the next update.

If you are using Debian, you may consider enabling the "volatile" apt-get repository, as it includes newer versions of ClamAV and SpamAssassin, which are both rapidly moving targets and worth running recent versions of.

Getting Help

Virtualmin Professional customers receive free installation service if the automated installation process fails to work correctly on any Grade A or B supported operating system listed on the OS Support page. Open a ticket in the issue tracker with a description of your problem and the relevant portion of the virtualmin-installation.log, and we will try to walk you through to a solution, or log into your system and complete the installation free of charge.

Virtualmin GPL users can make use of the forums to ask for assistance with any problems that arise during installation.