The Images that you have available to download for subscribers need to be updated. In the latest Ubuntu 'Perfect Server' Image (16.10), the hard disk space starts at 60gb, which is a nightmare if i wanted to use this image on real infrastructure - provisioning a 60gb disk for a image that takes up less than 4GB is unreasonable - please decrease the disk size to below 20GB. The default key-mapping is also in german, this is extremely frustrating to me as I just want to be able to use the image as-is, but instead have to mess around trying to sort out this annoying task. Please ensure that the key-maps are set to English - given that you are presenting an English site and we are paying for this subscription (and nothing indicates the mapping will be set to German). Please also provide better documentation for the downloadable images, stating the default username and password is not enough. you should detail all modifications to the image (including key-map etc which is not obvious before downloading) as we have no idea if things like jail-kit (in the corresponding tutorial) have been installed or not. I just want to be able to download the image and use it without issues.
The images are made to be used on real systems, 20GB is too low for that, that's why we have chosen to use 60GB and a format that grows with the data size, so the 60GB are not used at the beginning. The keymap has to be set to your local keymap if your keymap is not german. That the VM images use a german keymap is described in the base setup tutorial. If you connect to the VM by SSH, then you don't have to change the keyboard layout. Changing the keyboard layout on Ubuntu can be done with: dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration or sudo apt-get install console-data sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-data I will add a note into the VM installation guide on how to change the keymaps after installation. The tutorial + base image tutorial describe in detail every step that has been done in the VM and what is installed, the VM are an exact copy of the tutorials and contains the optional packages as well. If you look into the tutorial then you see that the tutorial instructs you to install jailkit and as the vm image is the exact result of the tutorial, jailkit must be installed.
Then why are these images provided in virtual machine format? I have stated I want to use them on 'real' systems, however I am forced to provision the entire 60GB for each machine on my SAN, however this has the capability to expand on demand - hence starting out small is beneficial. please justify why 20GB is too low? I have machines running on 20GB for years. it is also really easy to add more storage - but not easy to remove it. The issue I have is that this is not very clear for someone who just wants a copy of the image - instead they have to find out that the keymap is not correct. furthermore it seems that the defaults were just your personal preferences instead of sensible defaults - who are you creating these images for? the subscribers or yourself? Even further, its easy enough to set the keymap on install. however when trying to change it back even just trying to type dkpg-reconfigure is an issue because the '-' key is mapped differently - causing utter frustration when trying to fix the issue. the reason I bought a subscription is to download an image and go. not to mess around with this - i might as well have made my own image. please fix it or refund all my payments. I find this not clear due to this statement:
We used smaller VM harddisks before and many users complained. I guess there is no right size for all users. Btw. 20GB is really small, most of my servers that run ISPConfig are larger. That the german keymap is used is described in the base setup guide, and most users have to set the keymap to the local keymap anyway, so no matter which base keymap we install. instead of typing a command you could copy/paste it btw. Changing the vm images the way you want would mean to deliver an image that does not match the descriptions and tutorials we offer. As you are not satisfied with the VM image, I will refund you the last payment and cancel your subscription. You have to delete all virtual machines and server that you created based on the howtoforge images immediately that were downloaded after oct. 20 from your systems and you have to delete all copies of the ISPConfig manual downloaded after oct. 20. The keyboard problem is an important point and we always try to improve the virtual machines. I will see how we can make it easier to set a custom keyboard at first run e.g. by starting the keyboard setup autmatically.
