Skip to main content

Webmin on CentOS

We use CentOS for our web servers, and favor Webmin as a way to administer our servers. To install Webmin via yum on CentOS, follow these steps as root or sudo, from the command line (via SSH or at the console). These steps will also work for RedHat servers.

Configure the Webmin repository and install

Webmin is not available via yum in the default CentOS repository. Follow these steps to add the Webmin repository (repo) from Webmin.com.

  1. Create and edit the repository file # nano /etc/yum.repos.d/webmin.repo
  2. Add the [Webmin] section (listed below) to the new repository file
  3. Save the new file
  4. Import the public key: # rpm --import http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc
  5. Install webmin: # yum install webmin

Open the Firewall

If your server is protected by a firewall, you won't be able to access Webmin until you open port 10000. Use these steps on CentOS

  1. Backup the current firewall settings: # cp /etc/sysconfig/iptables /etc/sysconfig/iptables.bak
  2. Install the Red Hat firewall configuration tool # yum install system-config-securitylevel
  3. Run the firewall tool: system-config-securitylevel
  4. Select _Security Level:_ *Enabled*
  5. Click [Customize]
  6. Check incoming ports to allow (probably SSH, WWW, Secure WWW, and FTP)
  7. _Other Ports_ 10000:tcp
  8. Click [OK]

This will save your new settings and reload the firewall. You won't have to use this command line firewall tool again, as now you can use Webmin to configure the firewall.

Test Webmin

Now that you've installed Webmin and opened the Webmin port, test it out. Open your favorite brower and type your server's IP address followed by :10000, like this:

168.192.1.1:10000

The Webmin login screen should appear. Log in with your root credentials. It's a good idea to set up another Webmin user so you don't have to use your root credentials

Webmin repo section

[Webmin]
name=Webmin Distribution Neutral
baseurl=http://download.webmin.com/download/yum
enabled=1


Comments

joe said…
Exactly what the Doctor ordered! Thanks so much. Not sure why other tutorials don't include the firewall port step :|
Keith said…
That rocked! Thanks a million.

Popular posts from this blog

Essential Firefox Add-Ons For the Cloud

If you don't want to be tied down to a desktop, you need direct access to your computer in the cloud. Since Firefox runs just about everywhere, it's a good place to start to set up a reliable way to access your accounts. Blog & Social  Delicious Bookmarks is the recommended and official Firefox add-on for Delicious, the world's leading social bookmarking service (formerly del.icio.us). It integrates your bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access. Syncing slows down startup, though. ScribeFire Blog Editor is a blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. They've also integrated their affiliate Quick Ads advertising program, which I haven't tried.

Joomla 1.5 Directory Status: Writeable

[UPDATED] Joomla 1.5 is acting flaky on one of our installations because the directories are set to ‘unwriteable’. To see the their current state, log in as Super Administrator and go to Help > System Info > Directory Permissions . Elsewhere, it's been suggested that the specified directories must be set to “world-writeable” (777). This works, but it is a very bad idea , since it means anyone can change your files! Not cool. Fixing Security with User and Group Settings To perform these changes, you need shell (command line) access to your server. If you don't have it, you can beg your host to make these changes for you, or switch to a Joomla-friendly host. I'm going to assume that you are using a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server because if you're not, then ... well, these instructions should work in principle, but the specifics for your server may be quite different. Here's the issue: you, the FTP user, need full access to your files. So does Joomla,

Atom: Hackable Text Editor for Ubuntu

It all started when I wanted to convert some text to Title Case. Ubuntu's default text editor, gedit, is quite capable, but does not include case conversion. A quick trip to Google and I found  (gedit is number 4). Since I write some code, too, I'm always interested in a good text editor. After going through the list, I picked #2, Atom. Atom looks appealing for a number of reasons. It's available through the Ubuntu Software app (almost -- see below for details) It's built on web technologies. It's cross-platform. From the article: Atom is a free and open source text editor that’s developed by GitHub. Based on Electron (CoffeeScript, JS, Less, HTML), it’s a desktop application that’s built using web technologies ... The major features of Atom are cross-platform editing, built-in package manager, file system browser, multiple pane support, find and replace function, and smart autocompletion. You can select from 1000s of open source packages and add