License Question for Early Adopers Virtualmin 10

Very politely.

There is no "enforcement". The server phones home periodically to find out how many domains and how many servers your license covers (or it will in a few days--none of the license checking beyond "does this license exist" is even active yet). Once the license checking stuff goes live, if you go above your agreed number of domains and/or servers, it'll put up a red box in the right window. If the license is insufficient for 30 days or so, we'll try to contact you via email to get things square. If that doesn't work, the software repositories will shut down for your serial number and key and you won't get any more updates. The red box will also stick around until things are straightened out.

We are not being strict about licensing at this point because the tools for managing licenses are simply not good enough--when the new Virtualmin.com goes live, we'll begin adding a lot of new features for license management. You'll be able to login and see all of your licenses, domain and server usage per license, etc. You'll also be able to easily buy upgrades in 10, 50, and 250 domain increments. If there is demand, we'll even add a "buy one new domain" option for a few bucks. The new website is much easier to customize and enhance, so we'll be able to add a lot of new features in pretty rapid succession.

So, for the next few days, you could run more domains than you've paid for without any complaint from the software, us, or our servers. We're trusting our Early Adopters not to abuse that. We'll always give users the benefit of the doubt (thus the 30 days grace, which allows folks to do just about anything for 30 days before the license server flags anything as a possible violation), and we'll always try to contact you via email before shutting down your access to updates, but things will get a little stricter once we believe the tools are sufficient for making license management really easy. We don't believe you should have to be a bookkeeper to use our software--so, no need to keep spreadsheets of your licenses and usage or anything silly like that. We'll ignore license problems until we have good tools to show you instantly what your usage looks like.

<i>I still wonder though, in which cases a &quot;virtual server license&quot; will be eaten. Unfortunately your answer is not be clear enough to me: e.g. what is with the subdomains pop3.domain1.com &amp; smtp.domain1.com ? Will they eat two licenses or will they not? And how could virtualmin decide, if &quot;those subdomains have different content&quot; or if &quot;the are merely aliases&quot;? Perl is mighty, but that seems to be a challenging task. ; - )</i>

No, those (pop.domain.tld, smtp.domain.tld, etc.) generally won't have separate content and do not count against your total. Unless, of course, you create a sub-server on one of those domains to put different content in. They're just names (not domains).

Virtualmin knows, quite simply, because it knows when it is being told to create a separate content directory for the new domain. I believe we could be more clear in this discussion by not talking about domain names at all in the conversation--let's instead talk about &quot;sub-servers&quot;. A sub-server may happen to have the same second level domain as an existing server, but if they have separate content homes, then they are different &quot;servers&quot; as far as Virtualmin, Apache, BIND, Postfix, etc. is concerned. Nothing complicated about it, really, if you forget about thinking of them as &quot;sub-domains&quot; based on their name. In BIND, Apache, Postfix, etc., a sub-server looks different than a mere new name (alias or domain name) pointing at an existing site.

Domain names are just <i>names</i>, and are not at all related to how the number of &quot;domains&quot; are counted (i.e. a name just points to the domain...it is not the domain itself, much like the name Joe just points to the person that is me, but it isn't actually the person). Domain names are not domains. A domain has a content directory, mail accounts, databases, and as many domain <i>names</i> as you want to assign to it. Sub-domain names are also merely names.

To put it another way, sub-servers that you create count against the total. Aliases (or domain names of any sort pointing to existing servers/domains), that you create or that Virtualmin creates, do not count against the total.

<i>Frankly spoken i would be much more convinced, if your license would only limit the number of the second level domains, like domain1.com, domain2.com, etc, rather than limit the number of third level domains. That would be making life a lot of easier, clearer and much more calculable at least for me.</i>

Virtualmin keeps up with it for you. There's really no need to make it seem so complicated. No need to count at all. ;-)

Just look on the System Information page, in the Virtualmin Information section (click on the title or plus sign to open it out, as it is collapsed by default). The &quot;Virtual servers&quot; number is the number of servers that you have created. When the license management tools get better, it'll even turn red when you go over the number you've purchased, and provide a link for upgrading.

And, as I mentioned, we're not enforcing anything until we have good tools here at Virtualmin.com for managing your domain usage and the ability to upgrade to new domain limits easily.

I hope this clarifies things a bit and eases your mind on the license issue. We knew from day one that the single most common complaint about our competitors was how ornery the licensing terms and conditions of their software was...we're trying very very hard to make things easy, and never get in the way of folks using the software in the manner they've paid for.