Installing Webmin On Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04)

This document describes how to setup Webmin on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) server. The server I used was previously setup according to the HowTo Forge document called Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier And MySQL (Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft).

The only changes I had made to the setup shown there was to install Mondo for backups and also revert the dcc-client and dcc-server back to version  1.2.74-2. I had to do this to get the DCC client and server running on Feisty as there was no upgrade package for it (yet??)  and the instructions above were designed for Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10)

Version: 1.2.74-2
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.4-1), dcc-common (= 1.2.74-2)
Filename: pool/universe/d/dcc/dcc-server_1.2.74-2_i386.deb

What Is Webmin?

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely. See the standard modules page for a list of all the functions built into Webmin, or check out the demo and screenshots.

Why Not Use A .deb Package?

As of July 15th 2006 webmin.com has had a testing deb for the full webmin package. In order to use this, the root account needs to be enabled, which breaks one of the major security guides for Ubuntu. Using the following method of installing Webmin removes the need to enable the root account.

The Instructions

Install SSH

sudo apt-get install ssh openssh-server

Enable the universe and multiverse repositories in the

/etc/apt/sources.list

Create an installation location

I choose to install webmin in my /opt folder. Others may have a different preference.

The commands are as follows:

cd /opt 

sudo mkdir webmin 

cd /opt/webmin

Download the webmin source

I went to the webmin site ( http://www.webmin.com/support.html ) and sourced the tar version of Webmin. The source I downloaded can be found here.

sudo wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.360.tar.gz 

sudo tar xzvf webmin-1.360.tar.gz

Install extra required modules

There are a couple of modules you may require for SSL connection to webmin. If you are concerned about the implications of doing this then run the following command with the -s option and 'rehearse' your install:

sudo apt-get install libauthen-pam-perl libnet-ssleay-perl libpam-runtime openssl perl perl-modules