How to install Webmin on Ubuntu 15.04

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administrators of Linux systems. It is quite simple, using any web-browser you can set up user accounts, Apache, Installations etc. Webmin helps all those who are not comfortable with the command line but want to manage their servers. This tutorial covers Installation and a little work around with Webmin on Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).

Installing Webmin

To install Webmin via apt-get you will have to add it to your repository:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

After this, your repositories list will look something like this:

Go to the end and add this to the file:

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib
deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib

Copy the above and press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste it in the editor, then Ctrl+X to save and exit the file and then hit enter when prompted for the confirmation. After performing the above actions, you need to get the GPG key the repository is signed with. So for that type in the following commands:

cd /root
wget http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc
apt-key add jcameron-key.asc

After adding the GPG key you need to update the source.list:

sudo apt-get update

Now you can install Webmin by typing:

sudo apt-get install webmin

Or alternatively you can try downloading the actual .deb file:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.750_all.deb

This will download the .deb file on to the system, then you should:

dpkg –install webmin_1.750_all.deb

This will install Webmin on your system.

Login to Webmin

Open up the browser and type in you IP address with as following:

https://your_ip:10000/

You will get a warning for the SSL certificate, you may just proceed ignoring that warning. After you have navigated to the above URL you will get the following login page:

Log in with root user name and password. There are chances that your OS might have blocked port 10000 by default during the installation, if this is the case then type the following to add an exception:

sudo ufw allow 10000

This will do the trick.

After that you will see a page giving you your system information:

Now that you have logged in, feel free to work around as per requirement. You can create users by clicking “Webmin” drop-down to the right and select “Webmin Users”. You will see a screen like this:

Here you can create users.

You can open the system command shell by navigating Others >> Command Shell. It seems to be a normal terminal window, the only difference is, it is on a web browser:

You can also install stuff via Webmin. To do so navigate to Un-used Modules >> Fail2Ban Intrusion Detector. You will have a page like this:

As you can see the above screen shot the option of installation, you can go-ahead and install if you want to! So basically you can see, using Webmin you can perform all the basic tasks of an administrator. This will be it for the tutorial.