Webmin – Linux Admin’s BFF

What is Webmin? It is the greatest Linux admin tool ever invented. It is a web-based admin interface for just about any popular linux product. I’ve heard some other admins say “If you can’t do it command line, you aren’t a real admin.” To that I say, I want to be able to take a vacation occasionally! Sure I can admin all that stuff from the command line, but most of my guys at work can’t. If I can teach them to admin, say BIND, easily then I don’t have to be the guy that does everything. Plus, BIND is so much easier to admin through webmin. 😉 I say do yourself a favor and try it. It will, often times, install packages for you if they aren’t already installed!

I pretty much run CentOS exclusively, and the first thing I do on my servers after installing the OS is put on the Webmin RPM. It is as easy as “rpm –install webmin-package-name”.

I use it for:

• IPtables administration (called Linux firewall under networking). It is a simple method to add/update your iptables rules.
• BIND DNS administration
• Apache Webserver
• VSFtp
• Samba
• Chkconfig (linux services)
• Setting up cron jobs
• Doing some simple ICMP monitoring