$9.95 yearly

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any browser that supports tables and forms (and Java for the File Manager module), you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and so on.

Webmin consists of a simple web server, and a number of CGI programs which directly update system files like /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/passwd. The web server and all CGI programs are written in Perl version 5, and use no non-standard Perl modules.

Webmin features and settings

The main Webmin configuration the various main sections that you will find in Webmin are as follows.

• Webmin
• System
• Servers
• Hardware
• Others

Webmin - The first section by default is "Webmin" and is meant to help you configure your Webmin setup as we saw earlier. This section generally deals with ACCESS privileges, ACL's, ports, logging, user access and various other parameters related to Webmin setup. I suggest that you give this section a serious look.

System - This section consists of the following settings

This section helps you reboot or shutdown the system and also configure the different services that are running on your system through the /etc/rc.d/rc.* scripts. You could always stop, start or restart any services from the options provided out here.

This section helps you apply Disk Quotas for your users only if Disk Quotas have been installed and enabled for your file system during it's creation.

This section enables you to monitor the state and size of your mounted partitions. One could also mount, unmount and change the mount time parameters using these settings.

This section enables you to search for and read the MAN pages in a web based format.

This section helps you manage your /etc/exports file, which is used to create / remove NFS shares.

This section helps you view and kill the services running on the machine.

This section helps you to schedule / reschedule or delete any CRON jobs that you want to run on your machine.

This section allows you to view all the installed software packages, un-install any of them, install any packages from a local file system or even upload and install a package. Note the packages we are talking out here must be in the RPM format.

This section helps you view the various services that are configured to run in the various run levels, change the run levels or even create a new init process.

This section helps one to configure what kind of logging should go on. Using this section you can change the logging pattern on your Linux box. For example, send the authentication and kernel output to different log files unlike the default installation which logs all of them to a single /var/log/messages file.

This section will help you view / create / modify system users.

Servers

This is one section whose look depends on the nature of the utilities and servers that you have installed on your system. The following sections show up on my SuSE installation.

• Apache Webserver
• BIND 4 DNS Server
• BIND DNS Server
• DHCP Server
• FTP Server
• Internet Services and Protocols
• Majordomo List Manager
• MySQL Database Server
• PPP Accounts
• Postfix Configuration
• PostgreSQL Database Server
• Samba Windows File Sharing
• Sendmail Configuration
• Squid Proxy Server

These sections help you configure the relevant servers. These options are included for each services configuration are quite elaborate, but you may still have to manually edit the CONFIG files in case you require to do some extensive tweaking.

This section consists of the following configuration issues.

This section will help you configure your BOOT manager LILO (LInux LOader) if you ever need to tweak around with the BOOT preferences.

Setting up RAID devices on LINUX was never easier, using these menus you can make good use of the RAID support Linux has to offer.

This section will help you setup your NIC's, Loopback adapters and even the virtual adapters that you may want and activate / deactivate. You may also setup your Linux machine as a ROUTER to route packets to other networks using this section. To configure your /etc/resolv.conf go to the sub section called "DNS".

No longer do you have to use FDISK, CFDISK with the ncurses interface. Partition your HDD's, view the file system status and the free / consumed blocks using this section.

There are several more sections in Webmin like

• Printer Administration
• System Time
• Custom Commands
• File Manager
• Telnet Login

One of the most coolest tools that Webmin has is telnet through the browser and the file manager. If telnet via a browser is the cake then the file manager is the icing on the cake. The file manager is loaded with options like the nifty little option of uploading files to the server, sharing files and directories using either the SMB or the NFS protocol over the network. Apart from these options, the normal copy, cut and paste options work very well.

There are a lot of third party modules available for Webmin right from configuring qmail to running a remote Java VNC console in your browser. All of these modules are available as *.wbm files and you just have to download these modules from the Webmin homepage or any of the mirrors.

Installing these modules is a piece of cake as you'll soon find out.

Just go to the section Webmin/Webmin Configuration/Webmin modules and use the install module option on the page to upload the file to the server and install it.