My virtual content only shows up on the root IP addres

I write the answer below to also help others...it goes probably a lot further than it needs to to answer your level of knowledge. However, i personally get sick of reading reponses to questions on forums that essentially do zero to help other readers fully understand the subject. So below is a rather long answer...

When you say "i pointed the DNS name servers to your Virtualmin>Virtual Server?

The fact you are saying that you can only browse your website by the server external ip address tells me that the dns is not resolving. The reason that the "webserver external ipAddress method" works is illustrated using the following example...

Pretend you are a postman deliverying a letter to a street address.

Mr Postman knows how to find a house because the country, state, town, street, and number are widely published details. What the postman does not necessarily know, is who actually lives at the particular residence he is delivering letters/parcels to. He reads this often on the front of the letter itself.

On a webserver, these two (ie street address and residents name) are linked via a text file known as a vhosts file. This file which is stored on the webserver, links the website ip address with your domain name (some websites have their own dedicated ip address, others just use the main webhosting server external ip address). In your case, because you can browse the website by ip address, my assumption is, the vhosts file is likely working (of course a real test would be if you are able to access multiple virtualmin>virtual servers on your system using the external ip address.

So, In the event you have checked your vhosts is working correctly and apache is using it as it should, and things are still not working...the following is where i would head next.

If your vhosts file is working, then the problem would be that there is nothing linking your registrar nameserver with your hosting servers ip address. Essentially this means, a letter comming to australia from America hasnt a clue what your suburb and postcode are...and therefore hasnt a clue what post office to send it to in in your district...even though your local post office ( or "vhosts file") knows where your street and house number are and that "you live at that street address" on the webhosting system. Essentially this means that there is a break in the chain and the "the letter" never gets delivered (ie "error name not resolved").

You are essentially bypassing the dns resolution by typing in directly the street address manually yourself. Google already knows the country, state, and suburb of your webserver external ip address, because ip addresses are actually purchased by service providers and then allocated on their own systems accordingly with those kinds of details...which are then widely advertised across the "web universe".

The website names that match up with those external (or public) ip addresses, of which there can be hundreds "per ip address", are most definately not automatically known by browsers/search engines. Hence the need to match names with ip addresses each time a new website is created (taking a little "writers liberty" with last statement...but you get the idea)

The most obvious fix options to your problem are outlined as below: (i say obvious because these are the most common ways of solving the most common reason for your problem)

1. Have you setup and registered your Webmin Bind DNS Server to act as an internet name server? This requires at least 4 considerations...

There is a far easier alternative to the above...

1. Forget about using Bind DNS on your server. If you are simply hosting your own website/s you honestly do not need it and in my humble opinion, the bind example above, serves no purpose other than educating oneself how to use dns, and gives added workload and stress in setting it up. (so for a new setup, you can accept the default virtualmin install that automatically confugures Bind DNS, let it run in the background essentially doing nothing...turn it off if you want too, or just leave it as is after install and figure Bind DNS out later without causing any problems to your website)

2. Log into your registrar zone file records and add the following...

The above 2 "A records" are all that is required at your registrar to pointing at your Webmin Server External IP Address in order to bring website online via its domain.com.

Once you have website online, you may wish also to setup ftp and email. These two below wil need to be added as records at your registrar

hope this helps

kind regards Adam

Brian, would you mind sending me a private email of your domain name so i can run some external checks on it myself? adamjedgar "at" hotmail "dot" com. Also, do you have additional web broswers on your computer? I always use more than one browser when developing...sometimes even clearing website data from the browser isnt enough (i had this issue myself today). google chrome was refusing to resolve a domain even though i thought i had cleared everything, however it was working perfectly fine with internet explorer and firefox.

After checking your browsers history and cache is 100% cleared for at least the period you have been having dns resolution issues (say the last 24 -48 hours)...if that still doesnt fix the problem, this is what i would do next

1. mxtoolbox check to see exactly what server ip address your dns is resolving too?
2. mxtoolbox check for nameservers are currently assigned to your domain name
3. place a simple index.html file in your public_html directory so we can check without any fluff that its resolving.

Finally, do you have any other domains on this webmin/virtualmin system?

I'm having the same problem. I can get to the virtualmin login if I use https://(server ip address):10000 but if I try to use my domain name https://tcebstn.us:10000 I get this, "The site can't be reached".

The domain is resolvable and reachable at https://tcebstn.us

Any ideas on what I need to check/configure?

Thanks Brian. I have no problem using it as server-ip:10000 I just thought I didn't have something setup right.