The Book of Webmin Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX
By Joe Cooper
Webmin is a web-based graphical UNIX system administration tool written by Jamie Cameron in the Perl programming language that is designed to be lightweight, functional, and easily extensible. Webmin has been translated to over 20 languages and dialects at the time of this writing, and has been embraced by a number of hardware and operating system vendors as their default system administration tool. It is extremely portable, offering support for more than 35 different UNIX-like Operating Systems and Linux distributions. And it is very easily extended to support new features and options, due to an open and well documented API.
Webmin also happens to be a fast and easy to use tool for general UNIX system administration. This document attempts to introduce to you many of the concepts you will need to maintain a UNIX system using Webmin. While no single volume can address every aspect of UNIX system administration, a real effort has been made to provide both a solid introduction to many important tasks, and a nearly comprehensive reference to a typical UNIX server and its parts. It is my hope that with nothing more than this book, a copy of Webmin, and the documentation that accompanies your server, you will be able to configure the system to provide the most popular services, create a reasonable security policy, and manage your users and normal system maintenence tasks. Advanced topics are often covered, but I hope that it will not be at the expense of preventing you from seeing the forest for the trees.
Webmin also happens to be a fast and easy to use tool for general UNIX system administration. This document attempts to introduce to you many of the concepts you will need to maintain a UNIX system using Webmin. While no single volume can address every aspect of UNIX system administration, a real effort has been made to provide both a solid introduction to many important tasks, and a nearly comprehensive reference to a typical UNIX server and its parts. It is my hope that with nothing more than this book, a copy of Webmin, and the documentation that accompanies your server, you will be able to configure the system to provide the most popular services, create a reasonable security policy, and manage your users and normal system maintenence tasks. Advanced topics are often covered, but I hope that it will not be at the expense of preventing you from seeing the forest for the trees.
