Someone made the mistake this week by dropping off an old Dell PC they had lying around the house, and asking if I had any use for it before it went to the scrap heap.

I foolishly said yes thinking to myself that I could do with setting up a local server to run my sites on before uploading.

So the first question I had to ask myself what distro. Well windows was out the question straight away as you cant beat command line for quick tasks and I wanted to emulate as close as possible to my live server and to have  virtual domains which I have used in the past called virtualmin. If you have not seen this before it worth a checkout. Its a web based control panel for linux.

Now virtualmin can be installed in two ways, first by installing webmin then adding virtualmin as new modules or using virtualmin install script which would mean I would have to use Centos or Debain.

Now as my Dedicated serer is Ubuntu I decieded that my local one should be. So I started the process by downloading the Ubuntu server addition and burning to disc and then installing to the dell box. The text based install went perfect without a fuss. So I proceeded to tap myself on the back and say what a good job I was doing as I am useless at this type of stuff.  So now the turn of webmin, again a few small commands which I followed from there install and hey opened up port 1000 and I can see it working perfectly.

All things to good to be true hey !!. OK so now virtualmin. As per the website instruction I added the modules I applied them. OK I’m getting excited now as this is going so perfect. So with virtualmin now installed I click on the link to administer it and was given a screen where It had to test if virtualmin was setup and ready. Hey no problem click the OK !. Oh dear I had an error. It was telling me that Postfix Mail Server was not configured. Right 1. I have never set one up before 2 where the fuck is it. After playing around for 20 minutes I decided to see if I could use and Email Solution and hey yep no problem. I was able to install and Setup Sendmail no problem.  OK back to the button!!!.

So clicked again and hey we passed the Mail problem but oh no Apache Problem. Its telling me a suexec was not enabled. So ok lets go click and enable it. Perfect now enabled so hit the button. Oh still problems, suexec is now pointing to the incorrect route for the server. Its set for var/www  not home/ as per virtualmain install.  Now even before I go  any further your starting to get the picture. So I have a friend how is a sysadmin and my life savour which a few of you my know from IRC called Xajin. So now I am starting to ask the Q’s whats this do why that bla bla. The man is a complete saint but even some questions are far to hard to explain so after 4 to 5 hours of getting nowhere I decided to go back to the drawing board.

So now lets try Fedora as I am use to fedora and have been advised by a few admins to use it. Now this package is a full DVD. But at least you can download it. Well before I go any further I can tell you I have the same issues with virtualmin and setting it up.  By this time I have melted Xajin ears and blown mine away. So enough is enough I cant waist this sort of time and keep bothering my bro. So I decide to download Centos. But like all things this is not straight forward. You are able to download Cd’s 1-6 & live but not the DVD. If you want the DVD you have to use bit torrent and god damn that can be so slow. So OK I open up fileleach do a search and yep great 5.2 so lets download.  Next morning comes the file is downloaded so lets install. Aghh crap the download is corrupt and it wont boot the DVD. So again Xajin comes to the rescue by having a 5.1 version on one of his servers which I can download directly.  With some slight pushing and pulling yea were done.

OK so lets install !!. Now at this point my buddy has installed Centos and virtualmin on one of his virtual hosts and has written me down a complete list of what to do. WHAT A GUY !!. So started the install and guess what 30% through its buggered with an error on the disc. Grrrrrrrrrr.  Lets burn another at a lower speed. And this time following the instructions I have managed to get Centos & Virtualmin install. Hurahh.

This has taken the best part of this week to resolve and man what a pain in the arse. But just today alone have the local version setup with some ini files its working perfect with my NetBeans checkout out all files to server on Run.

All I can say is if you attend to use Virtualmin and like me you not the best Linux guy I would go with a distro which you can use there install script on. It works !!.

And last but not least a big shout out to Xajin. Thank for your help bro.