Disqus - Latest Comments for SwellJoe

Re: Old School to New School: Refactoring Perl

SwellJoe — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:00:22 -0000

We have to detect a whole helluva lot more than a handful of Linux distributions. Webmin supports a couple hundred operating systems and versions. We have to detect various UNIXen dating back a decade or two, Mac OS X, Windows, all the *BSDs, etc. And, of course, our detection code pre-dates everything in CPAN (or the existence of CPAN altogether). So, we won't feel too guilty about not checking CPAN first.

And, we can't really use any additional modules at this point in the process, unless we include them in the distribution of Webmin, as this is the install process and it needs to all fit in one tarball or package, and we like to keep dependencies very, very low. Pretty much just Perl; though optional SSL, PAM, LDAP, and a few other optional features support requires some modules from CPAN...but Webmin can be working before that so the user can use the Webmin CPAN module, or Software Packages module, to install them, if they're scared of the command line.

Re: Mastery through persistence and gradual learning

SwellJoe — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:43:50 -0000

No offense taken, ax0n. I agree with you on all counts. We love the idea of Webmin as a learning tool, in addition to being a useful productivity enhancer.

Re: Mastery through persistence and gradual learning

SwellJoe — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:36:43 -0000

Good points, Ax0n.

We (the Webmin/Virtualmin developers) consider mastery a good goal for all of our users. We take education really seriously: We've both written books about system administration, we maintain a wiki for Webmin docs containing over 1000 printed pages worth of docs, and online docs for Virtualmin spanning a few hundred printed pages. All of those docs devote a lot of attention to covering what is happening under the covers and behind the scenes. My book, in particular, covered exactly the directives to which Webmin fields mapped to in the underlying service, and cross-referenced the relevant docs.

And, because Webmin and Virtualmin generally allow users to use both the command line and the GUI to make changes, it is safe for users to switch back and forth as expertise and convenience dictates. As you note, making changes in the GUI and seeing what it did to the underlying configuration files is a good learning process, and often allows users to be productive immediately rather than after hours of reading.

Re: Disqus comments

SwellJoe — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:31:15 -0000

It is about on par with Akismet. I find that there are more attempts at spam, however, because Disqus increases the reach of comments--because of its automatic syndication and trackbacks and discussion boards, etc. it is a much juicier target for spammers.

As with the old system, I just recently (yesterday) gave up on leaving it unmoderated, so now I moderate all comments before they are published. So, I guess the answer is really "Not good enough, but as good as anything else I've tried."

Re: Webmin at 10

SwellJoe — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:33:43 -0000

Webmin has nothing to do with PHP. You can use any PHP version you like, and Webmin won't care. Webmin is written in Perl.

Virtualmin does manage many aspects of PHP, but it too doesn't care what PHP versions you have. We actually provide php 5.2.6 packages for some of our supported platforms, and it works fine. The Webmin Pear module also works with pretty much any version of PHP.

Re: Old School to New School: Refactoring Perl

SwellJoe — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:59:03 -0000

Hey Kevin,

Thanks for your interest! I wasn't sure anyone would care about the nitty gritty details of Webmin's helper programs, but I'm finding it an interesting exercise. As for CPAN, Jamie and I chatted about it last night over dinner, and he not only liked the idea of dropping it into CPAN, he suggested a few other interesting "ancient" pieces of code in Webmin that would enjoy some janitorial work, and might be useful for anyone doing systems management tasks.

I'm normalizing the versions, as we speak, (Webmin has a sort of odd way of versioning things, designed to provide continuity of lineage to systems that are the same, but restarted their version numbers...like Red Hat to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise, while most folks will want the "real" versions rather than these "relative" versions) and will be wrapping up the second part of this article in the next day or so. Once that's done, I'll start in on a third installment about releasing to CPAN, which is something I've never done, so it'll be a nice learning experience.

Re: PHP import and export

SwellJoe — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:56:57 -0000

So what bugs you about Webmin's MySQL module? We'd be keen to fix it, rather than make you continue to suffer.

Re: Webmin at 10

SwellJoe — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:09:16 -0000

Hey Paul,

I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no standard module for HTB. Perhaps there is a third party module for it...but, if so, why not just install it and make your own screenshot? I'm confused.

Re: Community, or not community

SwellJoe — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:26:22 -0000

Anon: Still can be used with only one user. But I'll concede the point. It's still four to two in favor of pure value, or "product", based business.

Spune: dodgeball.com was not a Y Combinator backed company, as far as I know. ycombinator.com doesn't claim them and I've never met the founders at any YC events. But perhaps you know something I don't?

Re: Sharing JavaScript Code in Webmin

SwellJoe — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:36:41 -0000

It's not a minor undertaking...it's still in development. Other projects just keep pushing it to the backburner...but it will be finished eventually.

Re: Webmin at 10

SwellJoe — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:35:31 -0000

augustusburg, Webmin works fine on CentOS 5.1, to the best of my knowledge. You'll want to bring up any problems in the Webmin mailing list...or file a bug in the bug tracker at Virtualmin.com. But we have lots of folks using it on 5.1, so it's known to work.

Re: Getting a great logo: reducing the field

SwellJoe — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:56:31 -0000

Too late, Dave. We picked one by ulahts that didn't get featured in this article. But most of us also liked the flag-style one by rust3dboy a lot.

Re: One config file to rule them all

SwellJoe — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:12:10 -0000

You're right, Christian. The editor in Wordpress is hateful and "corrects" certain characters, even when they're wrapped in pre tags.

Re: Webmin at 10

SwellJoe — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:27:20 -0000

Howdy Meow,

Just setup a different account--the one you delegate to, ordinarily.

Webmin actually has support for this kind of thing with sudo--any user that is a member of the administrative group or has "ALL" sudo privileges can be given "root" level privileges automatically. This is the default on Ubuntu (which doesn't have a working "root" account by default). But, while Webmin knows about RBACs and can configure them, I believe, it doesn't have magic support for such users. I don't think it does, anyway. Jamie sometimes makes wonderful new things happen in Webmin and doesn't tell anybody. ;-)

Re: The new face of Webmin

SwellJoe — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 06:21:20 -0000

Hehehe, ulahts, you ought to like it since you made it! You still haven't told me what size T-shirt you wear and where we should send it. ;-)

Re: The new face of Webmin

SwellJoe — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:09:51 -0000

Looks more like the Fedora font, to me. But, smooth rounded fonts like this are very popular in lots of places...not just the two most popular community-built Linux distributions. ;-)

But, I will mention that the colors will probably be changing a bit--it currently looks a lot like the Fedora blue, but we'll be shifting it over to the current Webmin blue (or something altogether different).

Re: Webmin Logo Contest!

SwellJoe — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 03:42:50 -0000

Thanks for your comment Butch. You're spot on. I think the competition leads to better designs from the designers--which is good for designers like Butch as well as the client (me and Jamie, in this case).

Re: Getting a great logo: reducing the field

SwellJoe — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:12:01 -0000

Hey NS,

Yes, we thought of that. But they don't need it anymore, so we could use it if we wanted to. ;-)

Re: Webmin Logo Contest!

SwellJoe — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 05:36:36 -0000

Hey Patrick,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I'm afraid I don't wholly agree with you. Your premises, in general, are sound. But, they place an undue burden on the folks seeking a new logo.

Here's why:

As a non-designer (or close enough), I'm not terribly well-equipped to find a good designer. One that I can trust to produce work that is both professional and meets my needs and wants. Such a search would make it entirely possible, and in fact likelier than not, to produce an endless string of useless and expensive logo ideas. It was that very experience with our Virtualmin, Inc. logo that led to choosing a contest path this time around.

When we needed a logo for Virtualmin, we first asked a number of designers, icon designers to be specific, we'd worked with on other projects because we knew they were the absolute tops in their field. However, we soon found that being a great icon designer is a very different set of skills than being a great logo designer. That avenue failed to generate good results for us. We then attempted to use a logo shop (LogoWorks, specifically), which also failed to product usable results. In the end, I gave up and designed the logo myself. I'm not happy about that, but it turned out better than anything anyone else gave us (I'm not lacking humility here, it was a unanimous decision, involving many more eyes than my own). We won't be keeping that logo forever, as it was a distinct lack of other ideas that led to me designing the Virtualmin logo. But it'll do for now.

So, when it came time to make a new logo for Webmin, which has been long overdue for a fresh face...I began to think back on all of the pains we had getting a logo for Virtualmin. I figured we'd try a different route. Contests have a lot of positive aspects, particularly for an Open Source project like Webmin: We can accept entries from our users (we had several entries from Webmin users, and many were even good...that was fun to see), we get to find a designer that we like in a low-pressure situation, and a get to see a lot (over 300) design ideas over the span of 10 days.

I understand your desire to see designers well-paid for their work. I like being well-paid, too. But, I hope you can see that from my perspective, a contest pretty much just kicks infinite ass. We have no desire to screw anyone, and we have every intention of having the designer of the winning logo involved in several of our ongoing design projects, if he or she is interested. It would make no sense for us to find a designer we absolutely love, and then not work with them again. The problem coming into the contest is that we didn't have a logo and branding designer that we absolutely loved (we know and love Kevin, but he doesn't do freelance work...we were lucky to convince him to be our guest judge).

So, in short, I think you've got the wrong end of the stick here. Consumers love choice, and a logo contest gives us a very high level of choice. I believe you're also being quite insulting to the designers involved in the contest, though that may not be your intent. We set out to make the contest fun for everyone, a learning experience for both sides, and a great way for us to meet some great designers. We've succeeded beyond our expectations on all counts, and we also find that we're having to narrow the field from at least four or five logos that we love rather than try to cajole a single designer into getting us one that we can live with. The designers have proven to be very receptive to our wishes and we're looking forward to a long relationship with more than one of them.

We're also looking forward to running more contests. We have a lot of design work ahead of us, and this has proven to be a great way to meet a lot of designers, and get a lot of great ideas in an affordable and enjoyable way. I hope that the designers have also enjoyed our contest and will be back for future ones (many expressed appreciation for the contest and seemed to really be enjoying it, so I think we succeeded there).

Maybe next time we can convince you to join in the fun, Patrick. Or would that be hoping for too much?

Re: Trying Out A New Comment System

SwellJoe — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:32:49 -0000

Sure, it's merely a feature. But it's a really good feature. That makes all the difference.