Article
Use Webmin for Linux Administration, Parts 1 and 2
Taming the Daemons
What truly makes Webmin priceless for Web developers is the Servers tab. Here, as seen in the image below, your controls include those for:
- Apache
- BIND
- CVS
- FTP (ProFTPD and Wu-FTPD)
- Mail (Postfix, QMail and Sendmail, as well as Fetchmail, Procmail and Spam Assassin)
- MySQL and PostgreSQL database servers
- Majordomo Mailing List Manager
- SSH Server
- Webalizer for Web traffic analysis
The level of control is substantial, including complete access to all configuration files for each of these servers, which can save substantial time on the command line.
Adding a New Domain
To put Webmin to practice, we'll walk through the process of adding a new domain to the server. This section assumes you use name-based hosting (one IP for many domains). If you're adding a new IP address, hang in there – we'll cover that in Part 2 of this series.
Adding the User
For starters, we access the System tab and add a new user by going to Users and Groups. Here, we select Create a New User. The new screen gives you complete control over the user name, password, home directory, and the groups in which the user will belong (i.e. Users, Mail, FTP and so on).
A common practice when setting up a new domain is to create a user name for the base home directory of the domain. For example, all sites go into /home/sites, so the user is newdomain, and the path is /home/sites/newdomain.com. This username would be used for ftp access to the domain.
Upon creation, you can return to the Users and Groups screen and add users who will have email accounts. Alternatively, as we will see in a moment, you can also simply use Sendmail to alias all the email sent to this new domain to an external email account, if the domain will not require individual POP accounts.
Adding the Domain to Apache
Under the Servers tab, click on Apache (as shown below) to add the domain into the httpd.conf file and set up standard or custom options.
You are provided with a fill-in-the-blanks form to add your new domain. Once it's completed, you can click directly on the domain name in the list to edit specific directives such as custom log file paths, cgi directories and other options specific to this domain.
Once you're finished, simply click on Apply Changes from the main Apache screen and the Web server is gracefully restarted.
Adding a MySQL Database
Perhaps your new domain will require database services. In this example, we can add the new database "newdomain_db" to MySQL Server and ensure that the user newdomain has rights to this database. Under the Servers tab, simply click on MySQL to access the MySQL administration tools.
Follow the on-screen prompts to create a new database; additionally, access the User Permissions section to ensure you limit the rights of newdomain to the newdomain_db database.
Finishing with Sendmail
Having graphical access can be very helpful, especially for new administrators. To add our new domain in Sendmail (menus show below), we simply need to add newdomain.com to Local Domains and Spam Control, and add the users into the Address Mappings section.
The Address Mappings section allows us to do two things:
- Ensure all mail sent to newuser@newdomain.com is delivered to newuser on the server.
- Allow a user to have mail sent to multiple email addresses (newuser, sales, support, info @newdomain.com) all forwarded to one user name, in this case, newuser.
Sendmail will need to be restarted after you enter all these changes -- simply go to the main Sendmail screen, and stop and start the server.
As you can see, Webmin offers extensive graphical access to your server and can reduce the stress and time it takes to administer your day-to-day tasks. In Part 2 of this series, which starts on the next page, we will continue by looking at server configuration and maintenance with Webmin and more.