Hi,

A couple of features, I would like for Virtualmin Pro, FreeBSD support, as we don't run Linux! If you need assistance Joe, we can donate a server. As well, having a new, individual IP assigned, from a pool, to each new reseller, would be a welcome feature. Thanks

Hi Dave,

FreeBSD is in the works. I've been stalled on SUSE for weeks now, unfortunately, but I finally got a successful SUSE installation over the weekend, and can now almsot move on to other systems. (SUSE is a gorgeous OS from the perspective of users, but it is actively hostile to developers, I'm afraid. I certainly hope the OpenSUSE project fixes that!)

Anyway, I expect FreeBSD to take a week or two after I've released the SUSE/Mandrake version. I'm still figuring out how to distribute the software to FreeBSD users. I've made a promise to always use the system-native package format if possible, but it doesn't seem like ports is very friendly to outside sources, so we may not have the privilege of using ports.

If you happen to know a good way to distribute third-party software via ports (keep in mind that there are several reasons why we cannot just send "our" ports over to the FreeBSD project for inclusion in the official tree, even if we were insured of inclusion of all packages, which we aren't), I'd love to hear it.

Oh, yeah...I'll open a wish about the individual IPs for resellers feature in the bug tracker. Sounds like a pretty good idea.

In response to using the ports collection:

I think it might be good to look into self-publishing the port/package. Although the ports collection is probably the most accepted way to package/publish, there are a number of other software developers that simply build their own ports and packages without going through the centralized ports collection.

Self-publishing a port/package would help avoid the nightmare that is sometimes involved in becoming a Committer or Maintainer. It might also allow the specific application of Makefile options that, I imagine, will be necessary to get all of the dependent packages work together correctly.

A suggestion might be to use an assembled package or port of all the dependent components. This might allow for more customization versus standard ports/packages. Tweaking or specifying Makefile or other scriptable (Perl, shell, etc.) options can be a pain. For example, Apache 2.X with SuExec, PHP4 and Perl/PHP/Python components for MySQL, is a pain on FreeBSD 5.4 although I have not tried it on 6. These packages might then all be assembled as in a single dependency-checked custom port for installation. It would be helpful to have both packages and ports available as a locally compiled port can sometimes out-perform a prebuilt package when using a custom Kernel and specific Makefile options.

A handy link (if you don't already have it):
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
Check out the "porters-handbook".

Sorry to ramble...