No. All typical day-to-day jobs, such as adding new web sites, or email addresses, or uploading content, can be done using SFTP, i.e. FTP over SSH, by creating files and directories. FileZilla is the recommended program for this.

This should not be viewed as a disadvantage; any confident computer user should be able to manage a Symbiosis system with the help of this documentation and the cost and security concerns of panel based systems are avoided altogether.

Unlike other control-panel systems, one of the aims of the Symbiosis system is to keep configurations for the various services as close to the Debian default as possible. This allows users to tailor these configurations as they need.

Although it is possible to access a Symbiosis system comand line as root (the equivalent of administrator on a Windows system), that is not recommended. Where it is necessary to run commands with root privileges, that should be done by prefacing them with sudo and supplying the admin password when prompted to do so. Most operations on a Symbiosis system must in any case be done by admin (or another limited user), not by root.

Yes! Symbiosis is released under the GNU General Public Licence, version 2 or later. All the source code is available for scrutiny on the Symbiosis project site. There is also a issue tracker to report any problems encountered, or to request improvements.

This documentation is released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence or later. It also has a project site, and issue tracker.

Symbiosis uses the following software, all of which is open-source:

What follows is step by step instructions to get up and running with controlling your server and setting up core services. The screen shots are taken from a Windows system, but all the programs used are also available for Mac OS X and GNU/Linux desktop systems.

Throughout the documentation, the example server used is example.vm.bytemark.co.uk. The example domain used is my-brilliant-site.com. These should be substituted as appropriate.