Adrian Ling - Webmin & Virtualmin: The Open Source Alternative to Cpanel

Table of Contents

Webmin & Virtualmin

The Best Open-Source

Alternative to Cpanel

(Practical Guide Series Book #1)

Adrian Ling Kong Heng

Copyright 2014

www.ilovevirtualmin.com

Copyright 2014 Adrian Ling Kong Heng. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission from the copyright owner and the publisher.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to God who enabled me to write this book,

and to whom I owe my very existence.

Special thanks to my beautiful wife and my 2 wonderful kids

for supporting me and giving me the time and space to write.

And of course, this book would not have been possible without these two great men who created it - Jamie Cameron & Joe Cooper in the late 2005 and who are still

actively involved in maintaining and enhancing it.

Today, Webmin/Virtualmin is one of the world's most popular web-based Unix/Linux server administration tool, with more than 3 million downloads every year!

Disclaimer and Terms of Use Agreement

The author and publisher of this eBook and the accompanying materials have used their best efforts in preparing this eBook. The author and publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this eBook. The information provided in this book is provided on an As Is basis, without warranty and is strictly for educational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply the ideas contained in this EBook, you take full responsibility for your actions.

The author and publisher disclaim any warranties (expressed or implied), merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose. The author and publisher shall in no event be held liable to any party for any direct, indirect, punitive, special, incidental or other consequential damages arising directly or indirectly from any use of this material, which is provided as is, and without warranties.

The author and publisher do not warrant the performance, effectiveness or applicability of any sites listed or linked to in this eBook. All links are for information purposes only and are not warranted for content, accuracy or any other implied or explicit purpose.

Overview: Webmin, VirtualMin and UserMin.

If you have a website or are managing a website or a server, you're probably familiar with Control Panels such as WHM/CPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, etc. These commercial control panels do a great job in simplifying server administration and allows anyone with reasonable skills to manage a server without having to know the arcane art of Unix commands.

While these commercial control panels are great, they are also rather pricey - for example, a Cpanel license for a VPS server is around $15/mth. In comparison, the monthly fee for a 1GB RAM VPS server is between $10-$25 per mth, depending on the server specs and hosting company.

If paying a hefty monthly licensing fee is not your cup of tea, you should definitely consider Webmin/Virtualmin which is a great Open Source alternative. It is robust, stable and being actively maintained. There are no on-going fee or even one-time fee. There is an option to purchase the paid Professional Version which comes with support of course, but it's purely optional.

While the interface may not be as slick or polished as its commercial counterparts, it is nevertheless, a very powerful and full-featured control panel that allows you to control nearly every aspect of your server from the web-browser.

This chapter will provide a brief overview of Webmin/Virtualmin and help you understand some of the different terminologies used in Virtualmin which is quite different if you're used to Cpanel.

But first, let's look at why I believe Webmin/Virtualmin is an excellent alternative to Cpanel.

The first and perhaps the most important reason is that it is Open-Source and it is very mature, stable and bug free.

The other reasons are:

• It is robust, stable and secure. It is used by thousands of servers around the world, both in commercial and non-commercial environment.
• It is being actively maintained critical bug fixes and security patches are released in a timely manner. The first version of Webmin (0.1) was released on 5th October 1997. The current version (as of this writing is 1.710) was released on 29 September 2014.
• It makes your life as a System Administrator so much easier because it enables one to manage almost all aspects of the server via the web-browser. This important because you can literally manage your server from anywhere if you have access to a Web-browser.

What are the differences between Webmin and Virtualmin?

Briefly, you can think of Webmin as the main core set of scripts that allows you to manage a server from the web-browser. Each function in Webmin is packaged as a 'module' for example, you have a module to control the Apache web-server, a module to manage the DNS server, a module to add/delete/edit users, etc.

Virtualmin is actually another module within Webmin, albeit a huge and complex module. Think of it as a mega module that uses many of Webmin's individual modules to accomplish a complex task and simplify the process for you.

For example, to create a Website, you need to:

• create a virtual server (a hosting domain, e.g. ilovevirtualmin.com)
• create the DNS zone and edit the appropriate dns/host entries
• create the email address/mailbox
• create a database, user-accounts and assign privileges
• etc.

It's a long, multi-step process using Webmin to create a virtual server (hosting account)

With Virtualmin, all these steps are boiled down into a few clicks enter the domain name, a username and password, select a Server-Template & Account Type and click Create. And it does all those stuff in the background for you. Powerful stuff!

Webmin

Webmin is essentially a collection of powerful Perl scripts that provides an intuitive browser-based interface for the system administrator to manage almost every aspect of the Unix/Linux server. It consists of a simple web server, and a number of CGI programs which directly update system files like /etc/passwd, /etc/postfix/main.cf, etc.

Virtualmin

Virtualmin is a module that sits on top of Webmin it provides an intuitive interface web-based interface uses Webmin's multiple modules to accomplish a certain task, such as creating a new hosting account (virtual server) with just a few simple mouse clicks.

Usermin

Prior to the development of Virtualmin, there is another control-panel called Usermin that allows the virtual-server owner (hosting account owner) to manage his/her own account. But now, it is essentially used as a webmail client for read/access the webmail.

Note: The entire Webmin/Virtual software package is written in Perl 5, using only the standard Perl modules & libraries.

Some terminology to remember:

• Server: the actual physical server (or VPS) running Webmin/Virtualmin
• root: the super-user (super admin) of the server.
• Virtual Server: the individual hosting accounts (websites) on the Server. In Cpanel lingo, a Virtual Server is similar to a Hosting Account.
• Sub-Server: It is similar to the Addon Domains in Cpanel. Basically, it's another domain that is hosted within the Virtual Server.
  • For example, if the Virtual Server domain is ilovevirtualmin.com; I can create a sub-server (e.g. domain 'adrianling.com') that resides in a subfolder within the ilovevirtualmin.com folder. If this sounds confusing to you right now, don't worry, it will be crystal clear as you read on. We will go through the actual steps of creating a Virtual Server, and Sub-Server in the later chapters.