The Webmin/Virtualmin duo is still used to control everything on your account; however, the new Webmin theme puts Virtualmin in front. Since this is where you would typically spend most of your time, it will make most of your tasks faster and more straightforward. For the sake of simplicity we will refer to the control panel as “Virtualmin” throughout, even though technically you will be logging into Webmin. Also note that the commonly used control panel URLs (to Virtualmin and Usermin) have changed and are listed in the following article.

• New control panel URLs

Usermin is now the default and preferred method for accessing webmail. Usermin now sports a new look (a similar skin as the new Virtualmin) and the Mail feature provides for a very good webmail client.

All sub-users (secondary users created on your hosting account on any of your domains) will have the first part of the domain added as a suffix to their login name. This means that when you create a ‘frank’ mailbox on your ‘myfamily.com’ virtual server, ‘frank’ will be listed as the mailbox/user, but the login will in fact be ‘frank-myfamily’. This is the login you would use for SFTP, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. Historically, Virtualmin only appended the suffix in case a unique username could not be secured, but this only led to confusion and complaints so we changed the default behaviour.

Also, moderately strong passwords are enforced through Virtualmin and Usermin. Passwords must be at least 8 characters long and cannot consist of a single dictionary word or contain the username.

The old method of “jailing” an SFTP account (see here) will not work on Solaris based systems (Joyent Shared Accelerators) due to the way getcwd (the internal function to retrieve a full path to the current directory) works on Solaris.

We might be looking for an alternate approach in the future, but as of now, there is no way to limit a sub-user created under any of your domains from moving around your account.

No default database is created for either the primary or any secondary virtual servers that you add to your account, so you have to create some first if you want to use MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

A naming scheme is enforced on all databases: a prefix consists of your master login and an underscore is provided by Virtualmin (that you cannot get rid of). Databases can be called ‘bigjoe_blog’ (assuming bigjoe is your account name), but not just ‘wordpress’. On secondary virtual servers, the first part of the domain name is inserted as a second prefix too (e.g. ‘bigjoe_mynewsite_forum’).

Also, there is no wildcard database privilege granted for your MySQL user, which means that you need to use Virtualmin to create new databases. phpMyAdmin can be used to manage all databases already created of course, but it cannot create new databases on its own.

Also, both MySQL and PostgreSQL now default to pure UTF8 (Unicode) character set setup on all fronts. All new databases created will be UTF8 and there should be no Latin1 getting into your way (unless you specifically request it at database creation and when connecting from your application).

One of the biggest changes is how reboot Cron jobs are handled. Since Cron on Solaris has no concept of “at reboot” jobs, we have implemented a completely new server that leverages the SMF facility in Solaris: Boot-up actions

• Batch create users from a text file uploaded, change options for select/all of your users at once, mass mail select/all of your users, and set up user defaults (Managing users).
• Create secondary administrators - Webmin/Virtualmin only users, with only the privileges you want them to have (admin-users).
• Use SQLite3 databases in addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL (Manage SQLite databases).
• Use graphical installers for popular applications (script-installers).
• Edit simple HTML pages right from within Virtualmin and make use of good looking XHTML/CSS templates (Edit web pages).
• Set up proxying very easily using the Edit Proxy Website option, or using .htaccess (Proxying to a port).
• Check your disk space and bandwidth usage from within Virtualmin.
• Have your php.ini configuration file created automatically and modify it using a graphical interface in Virtualmin (PHP configuration).
• See your website through Webmin ().
• Have your main admin password retrieved if you lose it (Recovering your account password).
• Dump/load your Subversion repositories (Dumping and loading a Subversion repository).
• Some annoying bits gone - no need to open a support request to enable a Mailman interface (happens automatically) or to have Subversion permissions fixed (there is a widget for that in Virtualmin now).
• Sendmail is moved from /usr/sbin/sendmail to /usr/local/bin/sendmail

All PHP now goes through mod_fcgid. This brings semi-persistent FastCGI handling, meaning when a request hits your PHP site, a new PHP process is spawned (up to a configured limit, per virtual server, depending on concurrency demand), keeps running as long as requests come in, and is closed when an idle time elapses. The idle time is set to 2 minutes (unlike Rails, a new PHP process starts up very fast, so this is not a problem even if a new request comes in few seconds after the old process was closed).

This also means however, that any changes you make to a custom php.ini file won’t take effect until the last active process is closed. However, you can kill off your PHP process by entering pkill php in your shell. This will shut down all running PHP processes and your changes will take effect when they restart.

On a related note, you’ll see that a new php.ini file is always created for you on your account (cloned from the central one) and you can also manage it using the PHP Configuration feature right inside Virtualmin. See PHP configuration.

Also be aware that PHP short tags are turned off, but you can turn them back on by editing the above mentioned php.ini file.

There is a brand new mod_security build, with the Core Rule Set that comes with it applied. The main difference is that there shouldn’t be any false positives that didn’t make sense (as in, “I just made a post to my blog, and got a Precondition Failed.”). However, some false positives may happen of course, because the rules are quite complex and we are unable to test them under all possible circumstances.

We have made all attempts to match the userland environment on the Shared Accelerators to what you were used to from FreeBSD. Some bits will always the exception to the rule of course.

You can still use ps to get a process listing for your account, but you should check out the new Solaris alternative - prstat - which is basically a combination of ps and top. Some typical uses would be:

prstat -J

which will display a refreshing view on processes running and the total summary for your account (the -J part), or

prstat -J -c 1 1

which will display a one time list of the top processes, including a summary line. See man prstat for more help.