Webmin installation on Ubuntu

Webmin is a convenient way to administer a computer across the Internet. You add Usermin and Virtualmin to administer Web sites. This page is an outline of an installation of Webmin, Usermin, and Virtualmin on Ubuntu 10.10 for use as a Web development machine and as network attached storage. The Webmin part is in progress and usermin is next.

You can download Webmin, Usermin, and Virtualmin from http://www.webmin.com. Webmin is free, open source, and there is only one limitation, should you want to extend Webmin, Webmin is written in ancient hieroglyphics named Perl. A modern version written in PHP would be so easy to extend and integrate within other Web applications and Web sites.

Webmin is discussed further in Webmin. A CentOS installation is described in Webmin installation on CentOS for Web development. I ran into problems and did not proceed with the CentOS installation because all my other Linux based machines use Ubuntu.

The components

Webmin

You install Webmin first. I used Webmin version 1.520. Webmin requires Perl and Perl is installed by most Linux distributions because many administration utilities are written in Perl. There are no other prerequisites. Some of the Webmin functions will require the installation of whatever application they control.

Virtualmin

For our use, we also need Virtualmin. Virtualmin provides Web site management similar to cPanel. Use Virtualmin to define the settings in the Apache configuration file. Virtualmin will require Apache installed. Webmin should be able to install Apache.

Usermin

We need Usermin to define accounts for other users of Webmin. Webmin lets you plug in a lot of different modules and you want to restrict some of them to individual users. Typically you want to define a user that can access only one Web site, the Web site they work on. You want to give the user control over their email and a bunch of other things. You do not want that user accessing anything on the server that does not belong to them. This is another area where you would use cPanel on a typical Web hosting account.

The steps

1. Install Ubuntu
2. Install Webmin
3. Log in to Webmin
4. Configure Webmin
5. Use Webmin
6. Update Webmin

Ubuntu 11.4

The installation for Ubuntu 11.4 is the same as the installation for Ubuntu 10.10. The 10.4 technique stopped working because the easy Webmin install is based on an old version of Debian and Ubuntu is no longer based on that version.

Conclusion

Webmin is cool on Ubuntu. I did not have to use the Black Screen of Command Line Death. I can install Ubuntu using a normal human readable interface then use the normal Ubuntu application to install Webmin then do everything in the Webmin Web window.