Who This Book is For

This book is targeted at intermediate UNIX users as an introductory text to many complex topics and as a reference guide for experienced system administrators who must maintain a wide array of services and operating systems. It can also be a valuable companion volume to a beginning UNIX text, for beginners who would like to learn the Webmin Way alongside more traditional methods and practices. There is no substitute for learning and understanding your operating system. But this book attempts to bring the two worlds together, so that time spent with a book covering traditional methods will map directly onto your Webmin experience, with the hope of making both more valuable and comprehensible.

If you have a desire to learn more about your system and Webmin, no matter your current level of knowledge, this book can be valuable to you. I make no assumptions of the level of experience of the user. I do assume a reader willing to read not just this book and not just approach the system from the Webmin perspective. The reader who will gain the most from this book will be the one who reads the man page for a software package while working through the chapter on that subject. Links to other sources of information are often provided, as are notes to help you locate where on your system the actual configuration files are located. Finally, every single option in Webmin maps to some configuration file directive, command-line option, or system variable value. Each of these directives, options, and values for the modules covered is pointed out and described. If Webmin has turned your system into a black box in your mind, this book seeks to pull the top from the box so you can look inside. There is nothing wrong with allowing Webmin to make your job easier, but ignorance of how it relates to the underlying system can only lead to confusion and problems.

Because Webmin itself predates the writing of this book by a couple of years, Jamie Cameron has a significant head start on this author. I’d love to cover every module in the core Webmin and a few of the better third-party modules, but deadlines must be met. The book has to be called finished at some point, and I believe I’ve made a valiant first effort to document the core modules. This book covers all of the general system modules and functions, the Webmin configuration modules, and the modules for the Apache web server, the Sendmail mail server, the Postfix mail server, the WU-FTPD ftp server, the BIND domain name server, and the Squid proxy server. I believe these are the most common services being configured with Webmin, and therefore I considered them the most important to document completely and accurately for the first published edition of this book. At any rate, they are the most common source of questions on the Webmin mailing list, and thus those are the modules that are covered here.

Note 

Perhaps you’ve noticed that there are two mail servers in the above list of topics covered, Sendmail and Postfix, while all other services are covered by one module and chapter only. The reason is simple: I prefer Postfix to Sendmail. However, the last time I saw any data regarding the subject of mail server usage Sendmail was moving over 65 percent of the world’s email, while Postfix was merely a small but growing blip on the radar. So, while Postfix is an easier mail server to configure and maintain in most environments, and functionally equivalent to Sendmail in most ways, I felt compelled to address both.



The Book of Webmin... or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX
The Book of Webmin: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX
ISBN: 1886411921
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 142
Authors: Joe Cooper

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