Spun Up Another Server Today

[RandomDroneGuy]

Actually, a VPS, but a respectable one: Eight cores and 16GB of RAM. It will be handling only Web for one very big, database-intensive site, and one small PHP site. The mail will stay on the old server after its OS and panel are updated.

The client and I decided to split the Web traffic and the mail because both the database driven site and the ginormous mail volume (along with spam and virus filtering) take up a lot of resources; so splitting them up seemed like the thing to do. The new server will chug along quite nicely handling Web only; and the old server, doing mail only, will be just respectably busy.

The new server is running Rocky 8.7 and Virtualmin. I briefly thought about Rocky 9; but I know that 8.7 and Virtualmin work well together, whereas 9 is still brand-new. I'd rather stay with what I know to work. The old server is currently running CentOS 7.9 and cPanel, but will be upgraded to Rocky 8.7 and Virtualmin.

I'm really getting sick of cPanel's incessant price increases, especially since no one uses it. All anyone else uses is Roundcube, which installs just fine on Virtualmin. I use Awsats and phpMyAdmin, as well; but they also work fine on Virtualmin. The cPanel license is roughly four times the price of the Virtualmin license, so the switch was a no-brainer.

Today's server makes four using essentially the same Rocky / Virtualmin combo. The remaining one will make five. They work extremely well together.

I'm a semi-retired Web developer, by the way. The drone business is more of a monetized hobby, especially in the winter.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

What is Rocky based on?

 

[RandomDroneGuy]

What is Rocky based on?

It's an RHEL clone, founded and maintained by Greg Kurtzer (the same fellow who brought us CentOS).

Rocky McGaugh was Greg's co-founder in developing CentOS. He passed away in 2004, and Greg decided to name the new distro after him.

I have it running on four servers now with zero complaints.

If you try it and like it, please consider kicking a few shekels upstairs so we don't lose it like we did CentOS. Greg should be sainted for giving us another chance after we let him down in terms of $$$ suport of CentOS.

 

[Jim Logajan]

This web site is running on AlmaLinux 9 which is alternative to Rocky Linux. Either one appear to be reasonable choices.

 

[RandomDroneGuy]

This web site is running on AlmaLinux 9 which is alternative to Rocky Linux. Either one appear to be reasonable choices.

I tested Virtualmin on AlmaLinux 8 for about a year before it was officially supported. It seemed to work okay, for the most part. Igor's a smart dude. The problems I had during testing were the sort that were to be expected when one has to hack the panel installer so it runs on an unsupported OS.

I had the same problems when I hacked Virtualmin onto Oracle Linux for testing. In neither case were the problems due to the OS itself. They were hacked installations for testing purposes, and some problems were to be expected. Oracle worked fine in the end, by the way. I just don't trust Oracle as a company. I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled the rug out from under us the way IBM did with CentOS.

In the end, I chose Rocky because I had the fewest issues with it during testing, and because the staff at Virtualmin recommended it as the RHEL clone to use if you had no particular preference. Also, it's the distro Joe Cooper (co-founder of Virtualmin) uses on his own servers; so when I'm stumped, Joe probably has the answers.

If I were running cPanel, I most-likely would have chosen AlmaLinux. benny Vasquez has a long history with cPanel (as does Igor, for that matter, through CloudLinux), so I would expect the cooperation there to be excellent. It's a fine distro.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Had not heard of virtualmin - I see it is an alternative to cpanel. My ignorance is because for the most part I'm a neanderthal who does most admin tasks from a command line shell.

 

[RandomDroneGuy]

Had not heard of virtualmin - I see it is an alternative to cpanel. My ignorance is because for the most part I'm a neanderthal who does most admin tasks from a command line shell.

A lot of times it's faster to do things in the shell than to even find them in the panel. I usually do whatever is quicker.

The other day, for example, I did something that made Postfix vomit with gusto. I'm really not a Postfix expert, having used Exim for many years before I started moving everything over to Virtualmin. So every time I touch main.cf, there's the potential for disaster. Webmin has a configuration backup / restore function that makes recovering the previous configuration for any or all of the servers a two-click operation.

It also handles things like migrations very well. I've lost track of how many clients I migrated from cPanel to Virtualmin, almost always without their even noticing (which tells you how often they use the panel). I would have no idea how to do that migration manually.