General Information

Webmin is an excellent web-based administration tools package for various Unix systems.  With the package installed, you can perform many system tasks such as user management, Samba, Squid and Apache configuration, etc. through a web browser.

Requirements

1. FreeBSD box.
   
2. Local root access on the box or be able to su to root.
   
3. A SSH client such as puTTy or SecureCRT (if you are setting it up remotely).
   
4. A web browser.

Installation

For this tutorial, we will use Webmin v1.230.  Find a convenient folder to place the webmin-1.230 tarball.  For this, we will create and use the /home/xxxxx/src folder (where xxxxx is your user folder) but you can always use any folder, just be careful.

# #	mkdir /home/xxxxx/src cd /home/xxxxx/src

Download the tarball (You can also pick other mirrors).

#	wget http://citkit.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin-1.230.tar.gz

Extract the tarball.

# # #

tar xvzf webmin-1.230.tar.gz cd webmin-1.230 ./setup.sh

During installation, just accept all the defaults when prompted (except, of course, the administrator's username and password).  Webmin is created using perl so remember your default Perl5 installation (usually /usr/bin/perl).

If you use the default port number for Webmin installation with secure connection support, you can access your Webmin installation using (but I suggest changing it to something else) https://hostname:10000.  Without encryption on your web server, you use http://localhost:10000.  You can also access webmin remotely http://www.domain.tld:10000.

To uninstall Webmin, find the uninstall.sh script and run it.  (If you accept the default settings during installation, the uninstall.sh script is located in the /etc/webmin/ folder.)

# #	cd /etc/webmin/ ./uninstall.sh

Configuration

After everything is installed, login using the username and password you gave during setup.  Check out the various menu links.  Common interests include configuring Samba, Squid, Apache and User Administration.  Webmin is such a gold mine for intruders so remember to take necessary precautions.

That's it.

Author: omegahash
omegahash at gmail dot com