After Installation

After installation, your Webmin install will behave nearly identically, regardless of operating system vendor or version, location of installation, or method of installation. The only apparent differences between systems will be that some have more or fewer modules because some are specific to one OS. Others will feature slightly different versions of modules to take into account different functioning of the underlying system. For example, the package manager module may behave differently, or be missing from the available options entirely, depending on your OS.

Note 

A common problem after installing Webmin is that some modules do not work or do not seem to work completely. This can be caused by some of the software being installed in nonstandard locations on your system. By default, when Webmin is installed, it creates a configuration for each module based on the standard filesystem structure and configuration file locations for your selected OS. If you have installed software from source tarballs instead of packages, or packages from a different source than your OS vendor, Webmin may not be able to find the files it needs to function correctly. Correcting these problems is usually a simple matter of modifying the configuration for the individual modules to match the actual locations of your configuration files.

Changing Webmin Passwords from the Command Line

Generally, once Webmin is installed all configuration of Webmin can be performed from within Webmin. However, there are a few things that can lead to being unable to log in. A common question is how to log in if you’ve forgotten the Webmin administrator password. If you have root access to the machine in question (i.e., you haven’t also forgotten your system password), you can use the changepass.pl tool, that is found in the same directory as all of the other Webmin executable files (this is the directory in which you installed Webmin). For example, to use changepass.pl to change the root password, you could use the following command:

# ./changepass.pl /etc/webmin root newpassword 

In the preceding example, the first option should be the directory where your Webmin configuration files are located. The second is the login name of the user whose password you’d like to change. The third is what you’d like the password to be changed to. Note that this script only works if you are logged in as the system root user and can change any Webmin user’s password.

Changing the Webmin Port from the Command Line

Another problem after installation may be that a firewall prevents access to the Webmin port from across a WAN link (if, for example, you are remotely maintaining your Webmin server). If this is the case, you will want to consult with the firewall administrator to find out whether port 10000 can be opened, or if not, what port you can use for your Webmin installation. Changing the port on which Webmin runs after installation is also a pretty simple process. Simply edit the file miniserv.conf in the /etc directory where your Webmin configuration files were installed (this is likely one of the following: /etc/webmin, /usr/local/webmin/etc, or /opt/webmin/etc). You’ll find a port directive. Change this to whatever port you need Webmin to listen on, and then restart the Webmin web server.

Restarting Webmin from the Command Line

Restarting the Webmin server is usually required when making changes to the miniserv.conf file. Some OS versions provide a standard method to stop, start, and restart services, which Webmin often supports. But all versions of Webmin on all OS versions will have start and stop scripts, usually located in the configuration file directory of Webmin.

Restarting the Webmin server can be accomplished in a few different ways depending on the OS and version. Under Red Hat Linux and its derivatives, for example, you would use the standard service command:

[root@delilah /root]# /sbin/service webmin stop  [root@delilah /root]# /sbin/service webmin start  

If your OS does not have a standardized service control tool like service, you may use the standard Webmin stop and start scripts located in the Webmin etc directory:

[root@delilah /root]# /etc/webmin/stop; /etc/webmin/start 

The miniserv.conf file contains many other options, but you will only need to edit a few manually. Other common problems that users run into include restricting their access by IP. This can cause them a problem if their service provider changes the IP. Simply mistyping an IP can also lead to the same trouble. The remedy for this problem is to add the correct IP to the allow= directive and then restart the Webmin server.