A First Look

Webmin is divided into a number of modules that each allow you to administer a single aspect of your system. Modules exist for most common, and many uncommon, system administration tasks. The standard modules provide a graphical interface for: Apache, Squid, Bind, NFS, man pages, Sendmail, Postfix, Samba, and much more. There also exist a wide array of third party modules that provide even more extensive functionality. This book will focus on the standard modules but may expand to encompass other modules in time.

Figure 2-3. A First Look

Upon first logging in, you'll see a row of tabs and a number of icons. The tabs are labelled Webmin, System, Servers, Hardware, Cluster, and Others. You may also have, depending on your OS and version, one or two additional tabs. The selected tab when first logging in is always Webmin. This category is where all of the Webmin related configuration details are located.

The view from Lynx is actually pretty similar if using one of the traditional themes. The MSC.Linux theme makes many links inaccessible when using Lynx, and usage overall quite difficult when in a text mode browser, so be sure to switch to a more conventional theme if you'll be administering your system from the command line. On my server using the Swell Technology theme, Webmin is quite useable entirely from a text console, making Webmin useful even when no browser is available. The MSC.Linux theme can also be rather heavy-weight when administering a server across a WAN link with a graphical browser, as the number and size of images makes browsing the pages rather slow even via a fast connection.

Figure 2-4. A first look from Lynx