Back Again
FreeBSD loves me again; it was a disk geometry problem that was prohibiting the installer from writing at the correct “zero” position for the MBR. Just a little BIOS ATA tweak, and I’m up and running.
Webmin doesn’t look beautiful (…by default – its skinning engine and options are quite robust), but it works like nothing else. If you install the servers from the ports and then put on webmin and virtualmin, essentially the five hours per install of work I was doing to get virtual hosting ready is done with a shell script and some tweaks through a web interface. It’s almost embarrassing how much work you have to put in without it.
There’s an online book about the software (300+ pages), and I’m trying to plug my way through it. It’s not that complicated, but getting it to where your users can login and maintain their websites independently is something that should be studied extensively (for security purposes).
But mostly, it works.
In other news, Fedora finally open sourced their Fedora Directory Server, which may hopefully kill off the necessity of OpenLDAP for good. One thing I can’t see from the website and the announcements is whether or not the little GUI configurator is attached to the server itself, or if it’s modular. It’s kind of amazing that I’ve developed to the point that I feel like GUI configurators for servers are for pansies. Maybe there’s a ./configure—no-gui option or something.
At this point, I see no reason to install X when you’re running a server. Why give up the memory and the security? I’m running FreeBSD on pure console. Plus, when you have webmin going you can do 99.9% of your administrative tasks from anywhere, SSL encrypted.
It’s just flat out awesome.