What is Reddit's opinion of Webmin?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

"Filled in pixel-by-pixel" is the generally-agreed upon definition of pixel art?

I find that problematic because for some images there's no way to tell the method by which they are generated.

For OP's picture, it's pretty likely that it's a screenshot. But who knows, they could have filled it in, pixel by pixel, from a reference screenshot.

Take this image as another example. I could have easily done that pixel-by-pixel or with the oval tool, as long as anti-aliasing was off. By your metric, the same output image could be classified as both pixel art and not pixel art, depending on which method you think I used.

Since this is a publicly-facing server I would aim for a distro that is current on security fixes (and has a history of being current), and is not "bleeding edge" (exposing yourself to new exploits or instabilities)... Debian seems like a good choice. The only non-Arch system (which serves as my mini-server for outside services) in my house runs Debian and I use webmin for managing it.

Edit: Don't use webmin

I would say first priority is getting backups/DR squared away and after that getting the old machines virtualized.

Nagios is a good idea for monitoring, there are also other options out there should you go that route. I would not recommend webmin, as it's had some security issues.

Ultimately, if there are so many places where outdated hardware/software/whatever are going to cause problems for your company in terms of downtime, budget is the only thing that will fix this. I would try to put together some sort of documentation along the lines of $x for new servers/hardware/etc vs $y for downtime.

> email accounts

You don't want your web server acting as a mail server, anyway, for all kinds of reasons.

I always recommend using Google(Apps) or MS Office 365. In fact, Office 365, which essentially runs an Exchange server for you on a per user basis, is one of the areas I have to concede Microsoft still does the best job. The reasons are far too numerous to go into here. I'd recommend research.

>wordpress sending emails from server

Depends on the type of email. Emails sent directly from a dynamically generated IP address -which you have- is likely to get caught in spam traps these days. You'll need the right PHP libraries installed, and a product like sendmail, assuming you're running the LAMP stack.

If you plan on any newsletter or user message, its best to use a service like Mail Chimp.

> lack of a "control panel"

You'll need to be at least a little cozy with command line (SSH). Products like webmin can provide a gui for many operations that you'd normally use command line for.

> subdomains etc

These are handled in your vhost files. The aforementioned webmin has a gui for managing Apache vhosts.

> etc

Managing your own server definitely requires a learning curve. Keep back ups. If you haven't locked yourself out of your own server a couple of times, its not secure enough (That's hyperbole, don't try to lock yourself out).

> do I run into the risk of having to google stuff all night trough for email accounts, databases.

No, you'll be googling problems for much longer than a night, but don't get discouraged. To say that virtualized options like Digital Ocean, Linode or AWS are better for your money is putting it mildly. Once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder how you dealt with so much garbage for so long; you'll never go back.

1) With 16 GB of ram, I would definitely install ESXi to give you flexibility. You may have some issues with part comparability but you might be okay. Check their HCL for what you bought. If you haven't bought ti yet, checking first would definitely be advisable. A CPU with hyperthreading would have been good though.

2) Honestly, you are best to just stick with debian/ubuntu. You want to stick with one of the LTS releases. This needs to be stable and relatively unchanging. If you are virtual you can split each function out to its own server; which would allow you to choose something different for each application.

3) I know less about the security. It sounds like you have a pretty good plan though. Keeping updated with patches is another key thing. Something that a LTS version of an OS will help you with. With ESXi and two nics you could create a virtual switch inside and put a firewall appliance (install something like pfsense) and bridge internal and external networks? I do something like this to keep my "lab" isolated from my home network. Remote access is done with an SSH server on a non-standard port.

Actually, after looking your server over again... you don't have ECC memory? Not requirement but usually you'd want that in a server.

Also, look into Webmin.

My company uses webmin and we've never found a reason to switch. It's free and pretty easy to setup securely. Also they have a new theme (I think you need to enable it in settings) that looks modern.

There are a considerable number of different ways to do this, but it depends on what you are permitted to do with the servers in question.

Easiest way (And possibly a godsend when it comes to administration) is install Webmin.

Another way is to use SFTP.

A third way is to login via SSH into one of the servers and use the SCP command. So for example if you log into server1 and wish to copy a file from it to server 2 you log into server1 via SSH and use these commands...

scp /file/path/filename.file username@server2:/file/destination

Check out webmin. It's probably the most useful piece of software I've ever installed. You set it up and runs a simple webserver you can access from anywhere ( assuming you know your IP ). It will give you great control over your linux box and includes the ability to do a webbased ssh session, HTTP tunnel, lots of fun stuff.

Debian is a popular linux distribution. Docker is a program that allows you to run applications in containers - everything the application needs is bundled into this container so you just run a command and in a minute your application is up and running without having to do any further installing. Also when the container is stopped everything that is not mapped to a persistent storage is deleted so in case something crashes or you need to update all you have to do is restart the container.

For example here is the command I use to run plex in docker: >docker run -d --restart unless-stopped --name plex -e >TZ=Europe/Helsinki -e PLEX_CLAIM=claim-YOUR_CLAIM_TOKEN >-h HOSTNAME -e PLEX_UID=2000 -e PLEX_GUID=2000 -p >32400:32400/tcp -v /persistent/plex/database:/config -v >/persistent/media/transcode:/transcode -v /mediashare:/data >plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass

You can see explanations for the parameters (here)[https://hub.docker.com/r/plexinc/pms-docker/], docker hub will have pretty much every application you want.

(Portainer)[https://portainer.io/] is a webui for managing docker. I create the containers in cli but after that I manage them through portainer.

(Webmin)[http://www.webmin.com] is a general linux management webui, you'll probably need something like this atleast to create your raid if you don't want to do it in cli.

So with this setup in theory you only have to touch the cli to install docker and run the commands to create your containers for the first time. Usually docker hub will have pretty detailed instructions. If an app should crash for any reason usually all you need to do is go to portainer webui and restart it. Just remember to map anything that needs to be persistent in the container (configs etc.) with the -v tag like in my example.

Ok, hehe, cool. The php/python was throwing me off.

cPanel has a 15 day trial, but is baked into the price with hosts like bluehost.com.

I used to admin with cPanel, and Plesk. However, most admins look down on these tools. They are sort of training wheels. A good start, but sysadmins usually install those tools to avoid being bothered by hosting customers who want to do stuff, but don't know the command line equivalent. It also keeps "power" users from breaking stuff.

That's not to say cPanel does not have a place in the world. But it obfuscates what's really involved in sysadmin.

Edit: also, important distinction: WHM sits under cPanel. If you want to go down that learning track make sure you have access to WHM. This usually requires a dedicated server.

Edit2: the open source, free alternative to plesk and cPanel is webmin.

If it's going to be a server, why bother with a full desktop environment (and all the associated user-space cruft)? If you really want a GUI for administration tasks, you could use a web-based tool like Webmin, installed on Ubuntu Server (presumably).

>Do i need to run another program to manage storage (example: Amahi, FreeNas, ect...) or can I manage this simply through the Xubuntu OS itself?

What exactly do you mean by “manage storage”? Do you want to serve files to other computers devices? Do you want to stream media to whatever? Do you want to store backups from other systems? Etcetcetc. The more specific you can be about what you want to do with the thing, the better the answers will be that you get on /reddit (or any forum, really).

I have been using the older, not so sleek open source version for years mainly for security reasons. We use Ultra VNC on our non AD workstations, and it also works well. Also, if you remotely manage Linux boxes, do yourself a favor and try this. You'll never want to be without it again.

Webmin is feature packed! http://www.webmin.com/ zPanel is also getting there, I love how the interface looks, however some functionality still seems to be in development. But I'm sure it will only get better!

Like WebYAST?

That's for openSUSE.

There's also Webmin which should be in just about any distro's repos.

ClearOS also seems to be configurable via the web.

Well, I may not be the best to answer this, since I usually configure all "by hand" in shell, but for control panels the most popular are: plesk and cpanel and you also the old but gold (and free) webmin

Any distro you're comfortable with will do. I personally use Xubuntu but it's a personal choice. If your work friend needs a GUI to manage the server, consider Webmin (http://www.webmin.com/). Don't let their dated website fool you - Webmin is quite nice to work with and use.

These are not questions that are deterministic. So, the best answer is 'it depends'.

If you have a lot of RAM, why do you need a swap partition at all? If you insist on a swap partition I would say calculate it as twice the amount of RAM if under 8GB of RAM, otherwise 1.5x RAM above 8GB. I have 24GB of ram and run without a swap partition.

/var - That depends on whether you run VM's, have a database, etc. I run docker images, MySQL, Neo4J, various VMs, and I run with 128GB. Currently, that's 38% used.

/home - well, how much will you be storing in your home directory? A couple of spreadsheets and some emails? Then not much at all, say 30GB. Loads of movies, pictures, etc: then you will need more. I run with 200GB, which is 30% full.

I would leave /usr and /etc on the root directory. Why move it off? I generally make / around 30GB.

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I have a number of VirtualBox VMs, which I have on a separate drive. (560GB).

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However, my best suggestion is that you configure with LVM volumes. This means you don't have to get it right on day one, you can extend, contract, add, delete partitions as you see fit. Make it easy, use webmin and you can do all of the changes in a graphical form.

Yeah, it seems pretty underwhelming. There are all sorts of tools you can use to administer a Linux server: Webmin is a web GUI, but I like Ansible, which lets me define configuration through code and push the config out to my machines.

My home file server is running Ubuntu Server 16.04 and while its not as point and click as FreeNAS I can confirm that NFS and SMB protocols play nicely together and I've never had an issue streaming over NFS. Worked perfectly for my WDTV's and still works perfectly with my various Android devices.

If you're going to be switching from FreeNAS to plan Ubuntu Server you might want to look at installing Webmin. Makes some everyday server management tasks, like creating NFS shares, a little easier because it gives you that GUI dashboard.

I use ansible for updates, but every 2-3 months and not for all client. From my experience linux can caused bunch of problems with update. Best way for me is to use partial update. Some apps with update wasn't be better like LibreOffice on version 6 or Thunderbird on version 60.

Also i use WebMin on all client machines

I'd say it's not too difficult, there are a lot of good tutorials to follow. It will involve a good bit of using the Linux shell over SSH, if you're not super familiar with that you should be to pick it up as you go along. Getting it set up initially was a bit time-consuming but the ongoing maintenance now is very minimal. Make sure you do some research on how to lock down the security. I would at least set up a basic firewall, Fail2Ban or similar, and key-only SSH authentication.

I'd recommend looking at the Digital Ocean tutorials site as a starting point at least. You can search it to find the topics you need to cover. I'd also recommend setting up Webmin or a similar tool so you don't have to do everything over SSH.

Bacula works absolutely great for my needs. I have very light backups of key configuration files, directories, and databases (vs. a full VM backup and incrementing snapshots). The Bacula server acts as a Director managing jobs and the filesets that are copied off clients (File Daemons) and placed into file containers (Storage Daemons). It also houses a PostgreSQL database which stores a Catalog of jobs ran as a record. The configuration files themselves are fairly straightforward once you get the hang of it and can be automated for quick setup to your environment. I highly suggest looking into Webmin for easy checkups and manual tweaks.

I then have a separate Storage Daemon which houses the backups of a different set of jobs which are less frequent with longer retention. The Bacula server also backs up its Catalog to this device. I have this running on a Raspberry Pi with a mdadm software Raid 1 to two USB hard drives. This is offsite and communicates on the network through OpenVPN.

This is a simplification but I hope that helps give you some insight to the capabilities of the Bacula community version. I actually have a Bacula diagram that I will be sharing once it is more complete!

Might not be 100% what you are after, but Webmin with the ZFS plug-in might get close.

Installing that plugin can be fidgety though.

Is the on-site VM a container like VirtualBox or Docker? If you don't like editing Apache's configuration files from a shell, Webmin gives a nice web-based configuration interface. I don't think there's an apt package for it, you probably have to download the .deb and install it with dpkg and manually install the Perl dependencies. Instructons

If you're an office, a dedicated dev server that can also host a DNS server is nice. It doesn't need much power unless you have extensive build processes (compiling code, unit tests): mine is a $15 Rasberry Pi 3 with a $5 64Gb microSD card, and works great.

I'd be interested how it turns out.

i use Ubuntu headless. when i set up the server, i had no idea about permissions and the like, but i started using webmin. (http://www.webmin.com/). Its an easy to use WebUI installable on almost all linux flavors. the samba setup was super easy and straight forward. you can also use it to get your feet wet with the CLI by using webmin to make setings and changes then looking at the config files to see what you actually did.

Samba is just the tip of the iceberg. you can manage all linux services direct from the webmin UI. i recommend giving it a go

In my experience, it is way too easy to bork your Samba config file via manual edits. As such, for quick-and-dirty setups, I've had good luck with Webmin's Samba service frontend, aside from the fact that, under CentOS 6.x, sometimes the Winbind service doesn't like to start up from the Web GUI.

If you aren't trying to do anything fancy with an AD/LDAP identity backend and just want basic share-level security, it's pretty straightforward to set up. I'd say give that a try before you throw in the towel.

If you want some more detailed instructions beyond that point, shoot me a PM; I should be able to hack together a walkthrough for you based on one of my working configs. More often than not, it's a file permissions problem, though sometimes you see weird crap like authentication levels coming into play (though that was more of a SCO OpenServer 5 + Win7 problem, since the SMB implementation we had under SCO didn't support password encryption... Yeah).

Otherwise, it's the usual troubleshooting steps -- make sure smb, nmb, and winbind are all running, check your workgroup string, check your firewall ports, check that the Samba user's local *nix user account has permissions to the share you're exposing, and basically everything else you already found on the first 4 pages of Google results. Good luck!

A more lightweight possibility could be sar from sysstat. The usual configuration is to have it added to cron and write system statistics to a logfile ever 15 minutes or so. It includes disk usage but also a lot of other infos like CPU usage or memory usage. Can easily do all this with your own cron commands...but why reinventing the wheel? Only up to you then how to expose that logfile over the network.

Edit: Oh..and another possibility that might be worse investigating would be ssh...you can specify what command to run with ssh (something like "ssh user@computer 'path/to/shell/script.sh'). ssh is available for most systems...so this would work in macOS or windows too...probably could create a simple shortcut that executes the shh command and gives you the result in a shell window

Ahh...I see.

Only idea I would have for that is creating a cron job and having the output of df directed in a file every minute or so. For sure not perfect...but would be easy to do.

Of course you could also write your own kernel extension to add info to /proc...but I think that is a bit of an overkill.

Then there are plenty of management solutions that can expose such infos through a network interface to other computers..something like webmin

And...the part I have no clue about...maybe this is possible to do with inotify. But I never tried something like this so have no real clue if inotify can be configured to execute a command when a file is accessed...but before it is "delivered". Just mention it as a possibility to look at if it offers what you need.

I fully agree. I'm not (currently) trying to be a Linux fanboy here. I just happen to have a fair bit of experience with Debian varieties of Linux. The same issues you have with Linux, I would have with Mac.

>I've worked in Linux, but I would not consider myself anywhere near a power user in it.

For me, Webmin was the single most important resource for making Linux useful to me. It's certainly not perfect - some of the modules are missing key functions, some are horribly and irreparably broken - but it's very useful nonetheless.

Within 6 months of adopting Linux, I knew how to do more with it than I did with Windows. And that was almost 10 years ago.

I agree with /u/cybertortue with the use of LXC. I kinda wish I set up my server with LXC, when I redo it with more capacity I will for sure.

I have not personally have not used monitorix at all it looks handy if you have a lot of useage on your server day to day. Mine does not though so I use Webmin as a web interface for myserver it gives all I need to know about it and also give me a simple interface to use for configuration tasks.

As I am still fluet with terminal though I also use byobu as a screen wrapper for local or ssh administration tasks. It can be installed with a simple apt-get command if you have the default repos.

sudo apt-get install byobu

Byobu can show all kinds of info right at the bottom of the terminal/ssh screen such as uptime, load, ram useage, number of users, temp, disk space, and more.

^my ^server ^is ^a ^minecraft ^server ^for ^basically ^just ^me ^since ^beta.

Full disclosure: I work for Rackspace.

Have you considered Cloud Servers and something like Open Panel or Webmin? I'd be happy to talk to you to discuss your needs and see what we can come up with. I can be reached at if you'd like to discuss.

I agree, it's a poor definition.

And it sounds like the process does matter for pixel art, as per the common definition. I find that problematic though, because who's to say if I hand-placed all of these pixels, or if I used the oval tool: http://www.webmin.com/jshock/icons/oval.gif

Did you try the Windows version of webmin?

I have not, but I know it's available. Also, Cacti can do that via SNMP/WMI, but it's a lot more involved to setup and get working then webmin.

I think Spiceworks might do what you want as well.

Personally, I'd save the money on the RAID controller and use software RAID instead.

I would recommend getting a UPS that'll auto turn off your server if you lose power though, but that's not a requirement (just me being afraid of a power loss causing something to go wrong).

Sounds like you want to use RAID0, which with 3-1TB drives would give you 3TB usable space. You do NOT want this. If any of your three drives die, you lose all your data.

If you've got three drives, you'd be good with RAID5, which will allow one drive to fail and you'll still be able to keep all your data (leaving you with ~2TB)

When I built my most recent file server, I used these instructions. It was pretty straight forward (although at that point I had already built a RAID5 array previously and was upgrading/re-starting.

I think it's technically possible to install your OS onto the RAID, but even if its possible, you do NOT want to do this, it'll cause you headaches if something ever goes wrong.

One thing I would also suggest is install webmin since it can make a lot of the rest of this extremely easy to set up, such as when you want to set up file shares and such.

I am also a self-learned sys-admin through few years of trial and error. Some tips I would give:

• Linux server in their default setup are very secure. Its once you start installing services/severs that you start opening up channels for intrusion. So your main focus would be the services you installed (nginx/php/php-fpm/mysql) and configure them to be secure.

• There is no 100% security, you can only minimize the attack vectors. Which is why backup is important, so when shit hits the fan you can actually have a good nights sleep. Setup auto hourly/daily/weekly backup.

• firewall

• chroot jail

• file permissions

• don't use admit GUI type thingies they often add their own sets of security vulnerability and then you will have to spend time securing them anyway. If you are interested you can look at webmin.

You could possibly use Webmin, as it as modules for everything you want to do (minus the 3D printer). It's an administration suite that is accessed via a web page. I'm not sure if it is compatible with the RPi (specifically, if all of the functions will work). I can try if you would like me to.

(Webmin offers a demo here, both user and pass is demo)

Yeah, cPanel, pretty much. There's a real need for a good competitor to cPanel there's a few like OpenPanel but it's requirements sort of narrow it's market too much.

If you want something that works well and for free, your best bet is Webmin

I moved from a dedicated server to Linode and reluctantly lost cPanel. I am using Webmin now and while it's nowhere near as user-friendly it's pretty powerful. I really wish there was a good host deny interface since configuring ipTables in Webmin is scary.

There is not a native way to do this in bind. You have to create the slave zone manually. If you're managing all your DNS zones by hand, and running linux/unix of some sort, you might find Webmin a big time life saver when it comes to managing DNS (although it's great for other things too). You can set it up on the master and slave servers, and once properly configured, it can create the slave zones for you when you create the master zone.

What happens when you apt-get install libnet-ssleay-perl, or any of those other dependencies? Have you tried downloading and installing the .deb file manually from the site?

Just to add to this, I develop with an Ubuntu VM. My main machine is a Win7 box. I like this because you can always back up your VM before making any significant changes. (Like upgrading to the new version.)

Also, if you're going to really learn this, learn it without a GUI. Learning how to set a server up with a command line (and via SSH) is a great skill to have, not only because you'll learn a lot more about how linux actually works, but you typically don't want to put a desktop environment on a production box anyway.

Lastly, I reccommend getting started with Webmin. It's a great web-based tool to help you manage not only your web environment, but also your server. And it natively supports https, which is nice.

Good luck!

Ubuntu Server is a great choice. I'm running that right now on my home server, which is acting as a Samba (Windows shares, which can be used for Windows 7 backups and file storage), minecrafting, music, torrents, etc. I love that it's headless and administered over command line, but if that's not your thing there is always Webmin (don't run this pointed to the internet), which is a web interface tool that presents the features of Ubuntu Server in a neat GUI. Now, the concept of working over command line might be intimidating if you've never done it before, especially when it comes to setting up Samba and whatnot without any icons or buttons, but theris a great collection of Ubuntu Server guides here, which run through the basics of how to set stuff up. You could always use Webmin too, if you wish.

If you're still unsure, here is a collection of links I posted a while back. There are plenty of sites of there that explain how to do stuff on Linux, but usually it boils down to if you want to learn how to do "x", you just Google "ubuntu how to do x", and chances are you'll get a guide or someone out there who was just like you asked it and had it answered.

I am not sure if webmin is in the ports collection, but it might be what you are looking for. I would suggest using freenas as an opportunity to learn to make the changes you want from the command line if you want to do some good solid learning.

http://www.webmin.com/

Also - some others might downvote this but when starting out throw Webmin on the box.

Webmin is a web-based administration tool that can help you learn a lot about what the server can do and how to do it. Try to use it as a "learning tool" and not a crutch. You can usually see the actual command that was executed after using the web-interface to perform a command. So then look at that command and try and learn what it did by thinking through the change etc. you just made.

If you are looking for something other than the terminal look into Webmin, it has been fantastic for some things, but I still fall back to the terminal for most things.

As others pointed out move your mail to Google or some place else. We don't pay $.01 for e-mail through them.

How much space are you looking to backup? How many servers? Do you back up the workstations? We just put in a 4TiB active/active cluster for a few grand. It is still in testing phase, but so far is fantastic. We do offsite backups to s3 via Jungledisk Workgroup (rsync) or Jungledisk server (for individual servers, smaller data sets).

The last company I worked for ran SBS server when I started, but they quickly outgrew it. The price for an all Microsoft shop is pretty crazy, and gets out of hand fast. If you are comfortable with your Linux environment stick with it.

Not sure if you want to or how people like it here, but I have used virtualmin http://www.webmin.com/virtualmin.html to manage small sites on a box I have.

It serves it purpose for what I need and makes the sites as /home/username/public_html

If you don't want to add MC to the init.d but are worried about it not started if the server gets restarted, add a cron job to detect and restart (or start) Minecraft every 4 hours or so.

The only downside is if your server restarts at precisely 1 minute past your 4 hour reboot, then your server will be down for 3 hours and 59 minutes. The upside is that your server will be restarted every 4 hours to help with any leaked memory, etc.

Other than that, everyone else talking about Screen, etc, is right on. If you want an easy way to make cron jobs, look into Webmin.

Positive. I had to verify this a few weeks ago while I was helping out a fellow admin.

Just to be sure, I just installed webmin on one of my virtual machines just now. I verified that the usermin module defaults "Password encryption method" to "Determine automatically". I then generated a throw away password for one of the users, took the salt out of /etc/shadow (first two chars of the hash), and plugged that password and salt into DES hashing algorithm (openssl passwd -salt $SALT $PASSWORD). The output of the DES hasher and the password hash Webmin put in /etc/shadow match. Feel free to independently verify this.

Also, the PAM discussion in the Webmin FAQ (which I assume you're talking about this FAQ) is about the configuration of Webmin to use PAM, and has nothing to do with the setting of user passwords.

Virtualmin or Webmin has served me very well, if not a bit of a learning curve regarding how it organizes different tools and pages in it's menu. Nowadays it's more an interface I can give to other users of my setup for ease of use, while I've become much more comfy with command line.

Caveat: I'm assuming you are running Linux for things. Pro: It's actively maintained and has been around for a heck of a while.

Ubuntu Server is as easy to manage as Debian.

If you are not (yet) comfortable with editing configurations, starting services from the terminal, ... there are plenty of web-interfaces to manage a server, like Webmin.

Das ist wahrscheinlich die einfachste Lösung, und billiger als eine FritzBox zu kaufen. Eine andere Variante wär Webmin zusätzlich zu PiHole, damit kannst recht einfach eine ganze Reihe von Diensten konfigurieren, unter anderem einen DHCP server. Würd ich empfehlen, falls OP noch andere Dienste auf dem Pi laufen lassen will.

Doesn't have CPanel, it's just VPS - but you can install (Webmin)[http://www.webmin.com/] after installing OS. Not the same thing, a bit more tricky than CPanel but definitely helped me when moving from Windows to Linux because I didn't have to mess with individual conf files.

It also allows to backup and restore the whole server config so in case you move your VPS or reinstall, this makes it really easy.

We've tested about all cloud platforms out there (including AWS, G, Linode, Ramnode, Scaleway, you name it) and in the end we got back to OVH. Had various issues with all others, but had 100% uptime with OVH. They also offer free DDoS protection included and network is really stable. The only thing meh is SSD speed, median but unless you have extremely heavy SSD access there won't be a difference.

Also mentioning they have datacenters in multiple countries so you can pick from. The bare metal servers are also well priced if you ever will need more power.

Just checked, it's an Ubuntu server running in an LXC container with 4gb of RAM. I used the Ubuntu Linux 19.04 template. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Linux_Container Currently shares out an 8tb chunk of space via Samba. Webmin does indeed provide a web based management GUI for all things Unix, not just Samba. http://www.webmin.com/ hope that helps.

Just to check you were looking at the normal licences, not the Enterprise licences?

Although it is quite basic, there is a webmin module for VSFTPD

Running a home web server is generally not a good idea, it's also usually against your ISP's ToS.

I actually have a home webserver that I use for testing applications before putting them into production. I have it configured the same exact as my production server: Debian + Webmin. I rarely have it publicly accessible. I usually keep the port forwards disabled unless needed. I use Google Domains for DNS, as it works with Untangle's DDNS service. Email requires additional setup depending on what OS you go with. I use postfix.

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Webmin is similar to cpanel, but it's free: http://www.webmin.com/

There are a couple of projects that may fill this role:

http://www.webmin.com/
https://cockpit-project.org/

But in my experience, most remote management of Linux systems is done through SSH/SFTP and scripting.

HA!

Before I discovered unRAID, I did just that. There is literally a webserver called WEBMIN that manages your linux (in my case ubuntu) server. It can be modified to do whatever you want. Not quite the polish of FreeNAS or a Stand alone NAS but still very useful. Thats how I first got into linux.

$ make -C /usr/ports/sysutils/webmin describe webmin-1.930|/usr/ports/sysutils/webmin|/usr/local|Web-based interface for system administration for Unix|/usr/ports/sysutils/webmin/pkg-descr||sysutils||||/usr/ports/devel/ccache /usr/ports/lang/perl5.30 /usr/ports/lang/python36|/usr/ports/devel/p5-IO-Tty /usr/ports/lang/perl5.30 /usr/ports/lang/python36 /usr/ports/security/p5-Authen-PAM /usr/ports/security/p5-Net-SSLeay|http://www.webmin.com/

Webmin is not specific to FreeBSD. Be sure to note the lack of a secure public web site in the latter half of 2019 and the history of Wembin before deploying and configuring it.

Looks nice.

I asume you have bind running as DNS caching server? You can configure it to hold your machines names, including the NAS and anything you throw at it. Set the HCP up to give the correct IP adresses.

What I use is webmin to do the configuration.

I personaly have replaced PiHole with a list of domain names that I put in bind, because I never looked at the stats anyway and had bind running. These then point to 0.0.0.0

You can only have one DHCP server (unless you know what you are doing) so it is either the router or one of the Pi's.

There also is a way to disable the DNS in Chrome. Forgot how and am not at home to verify.

I'm pondering if I would have noticed a malicious code change. VCS like git should help with preventing a malicious code change bein unnoticed. If you have enough time to read all commits at least. And that is a totally unrealistic "if" for a lot of projects.

From reading this the desciption of webmin it sounds like their build process was doing stange things like syncing files with git without actually using the git command? I'm not sure on the detail.

Then, even when only git is used to handle files it propably isn't perfectly secure. If you rooted the build server you could infect files with your backdoor transparently with some kind of post-checkout-hook or trigger mechanism.

>though I can imagine most folks are using github

Unfortunately the official download page: http://www.webmin.com/download.html and even the installation guide on Github: https://github.com/webmin/webmin/blob/master/README.md direct you to sourceforge. I'd actually expect the majority of users to therefore grab it from there.

You can see the thread here where we pulled apart the vulnerability and /u/brontide found the backdoor:

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/crk77z/0day_remote_code_execution_for_webmin/

There's no way to know what your friend was using, but I believe you are looking for Webmin: http://www.webmin.com/

If you can do it in Linux, it's available in Webmin via your favorite browser. One you've added the repo and verified the package via PGP key is as simple as apt-get install webmin

>http://www.webmin.com/cgi-bin/search\_third.cgi?search=openvpn

I've been trying to search for the same thing these last few weeks. Based on this link:

https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/RelatedProjects

Most projects are fairly old and not being actively worked on. I was going to give VAM a try since it seemed fairly simple.

Install any lamp stack variant you choose. Then install the Free Webmin, Virtualmin and Cloudmin.

Install Webmin: http://www.webmin.com

With Webmin you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing, mail servers, snmp monitoring and more.

Virtualmin Control Panels: https://www.virtualmin.com

With Virtualmin you can manage multiple virtual hosts through a single interface like Cpanel. Create and manage virtual hosts, servers, MySQL databases, DNS domains...

Cloudmin - Manage Virtual Systems:

http://www.webmin.com/cloudmin.html

Using Cloudmin you can create, destroy, resize, startup, shutdown and restrict multiple server containers.

S.u.S.E. (5.3) (later SuSE, SUSE and now openSUSE). That till 2 or 3 years ago for no other reason than to try something that was not openSUSE and went with Debian. Basically because I do not like the 'sudo whatever' from Ubuntu and I wanted something that was not RPM based.

I do miss YaST. I have it replaces with Webmin The abilities to do a websearch and click on something to install, as well as easily building your own distro with openSUSE is something I will greatly remember. Even dealing with the (Novell at that time) legal team over Trademarks issues was a great experience. They really tried to do as much as possible without giving up the trademark (obviously).

If I leave Debian, I probably will go back to openSUSE.

I use this module for Webmin: http://www.webmin.com/cgi-bin/search_third.cgi?search=nginx

But download the updated version directly from his site.

sure, but Webmin is installed in around 5 minutes and is a webUI for a ton of different *nix distros. or you could install Ubuntu and use the GUI if you're not starved for RAM.

as said, not trying to look down on unRAID, I just want to point out that the free options work just as great besides the cool feature of unRAID which is the file system.

Not sure if this is what you want, but...

If what you want is a way to edit cronjobs via a webfront, take a look at Webmin.

Of course, Webmin allows you to do a lot of other things as well :)

http://www.webmin.com/ - I use it on a few boxes when I don't feel like looking up all the directives for a given thing like samba or named. Kind of like what I wish cockpit could do but not quite as refined looking.

Hey. I tried connecting through the ip and got this error.

However, retrying with the servname:10000 worked. I closed and reopened the tab (have to fuck it up, eh) and got the same error.

Tried it in internet explorer and got these error and troubleshoot message.

After changing the ssl to 0 and trying with the IP, it worked. I have tried a few more times and it seems to still be working.

Do you think that installing SSL through any of these guides might help with anything or should I just leave it as is?

Thanks a lot for your time!

For anyone who happens to stumble across this, I found a handy little tool for setting up software raid in Ubuntu (and other distros) super easily. It's called webmin. It gives you a web-based gui from which you can monitor your system & do many common tasks easily in one place (including setting up raid). For raid setup you'll also need to install mdadm from the ubuntu repo. Cheers!

You can do but it's a faff. A misconfiguration in Postfix can leave your server open to spammers who will get your ip blacklisted.
I'd also vote for SES as Amazon have all the infrastructure already and it's inexpensive. You can integrate it nicely into your flask app with the boto3 library too.
If you want to go the Postfix, dovecot etc. route as a learning exercise, using something like webmin on a vps will help get you set up quicker. It still needs some configuration but the bulk of the legwork is handled for you.

> http://www.webmin.com/security.html

Responding to thank you for taking the time to write this up. I didn't see it until just now. I've been a user of Webmin/Virtualmin for about 8 years now. It lessened the learning curve of my journey to understanding Linux and I'm very grateful for that. Despite my request for a GUI, I'm very comfortable with Linux. That being said, I dabble a lot and once something is set how I like it I usually leave it. A GUI is more friendly when I need to login after a hiatus and make some changes.

So thanks for contributing to such an awesome product and thanks again for the response!

We use http://www.webmin.com/ on the private network for simple management. It's free and if you are just shy of playing around on command line, will be adequate for what you want.

No matter which panel you go with, make sure it is locked down good and tight if it isn't intended for the general public to access.

As others suggested, give Debian a try. Grab the net-install image provided at https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst and select the httpredir when prompted for a package mirror during install (which is the new debian cdn and should give you faster download times). IIRC, Debian should use no more than 60MB of your RAM when booted with no GUI and just an SSH server running. If you want a nice web management panel I suggest Webmin http://www.webmin.com/.

For the reference, my previous home server was a Core 2 Duo E7500, 3GB DDR3 and 2x 2TB hard drives. I was able to run a wordpress blog, owncloud, subsonic, samba shares, a small minecraft server (no more than 6 players with very few plugins), transmission-daemon and xfce without performance problems.

Your hardware should be more than fine for that usage scenario.

Also, have you tried cleaning your GPU fan? If integrated graphics is an option you may want to run on that. Remember to select the lower "shared iGPU" memory option available on your bios settings, since you'll run on text mode anyways.

Edit: what do you intend on using your server for?

For the management part, webmin is a good alternative to cpanel. Webmin is more geared to general server administration while cpanel is more geared towards web hosting. It supports rebooting, downloading/uploading files, managing cron jobs and much more. You can give your users access to only the modules they need.

For simple monitoring, any monitoring as a service tool (like the ones already mentioned) should work. https://cronitor.io/ has a slightly different take which can be more suitable for monitoring recurring things like backups.

I don't know any monitoring as a service tool that supports checking running processes. To my knowledge, most people use nagios/naemon for that (with the check_procs plugin).

Full disclosure: I work for op5, which builds and sells monitoring software based on Naemon

It takes some learning, but essentially it really isn't that difficult.

Basically to get the server to the state that you would have from a hosting provider, you would follow the guide here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu

Essentially, you are just copying and pasting commands, so nothing challenging.

When that is done, anything that you play in the folder "/var/www/html" on the server will show up online.

I don't know about torrenting control panels, but it is more thank likely possible. On the other hand, Webmin is a free alternative that does pretty much the same, that can be installed in one command. You could try the demo here: http://www.webmin.com/udemo.html

And yes, this is a VPS. You may even find ones cheaper if you look around, but this has been the most cos effective one that I have found as of yet.

I was not successful with my attempt. I did however find a tool called webmin and I like it.

Take a look here: http://www.webmin.com/index.html

install I followed here: http://www.webmin.com/deb.html

It is a complete web based administration tool. With SSH,file manager,and plenty of other tools!

FreeNAS is probably your best go here. Ubuntu doesn't differ much from debian in the way you need to set things up.

Install webmin and do everything from there if you'd like to keep using debian (or linux in general) http://www.webmin.com/deb.html you should use the APT repository.

Does web interface count as a GUI way? Because there are debian packages for Webmin (http://www.webmin.com/), and while the interface is a bit weird to get around (eg.: "system modules" are not exactly modules about the system, and "user administration" is about the webmin users, not the system users), it does work pretty well to manage users, security, packages, sensors, cronjobs and the like.

> Is there a difference in performance in a VM?

You will assign cores to a VM, so the more cores the more you can assign at once. Now, if you have 4 cores and six VM's you can still do that with a general setup. However, heavy utilization of those VM's will bog down your system.

> are there any advantages to using a xeon vs an i3?

ECC is a pretty big advantage, imo. Xeons are more comparible to an i7. I've heard they bin i7's as Xeons if they pass testing with a high enough mark, but that could be wrong. Google knows more than me on the topic.

> One of the advantages have having an i5 would be the built in gpu if i wanted to do anything through a gui. But would I need a gpu per VM?

No, KVM uses a virtual gpu and then renders through Spice/VNC. In fact, PCI-Passthrough doesn't work with integrated graphics, so having it in your system is completely moot, imo. Once you get the OS installed, you can configure everything through SSH. Or a program called Webmin. Of course, if you go with Ubuntu then you'll utilize the Integrated GPU for the OS itself.

> I'm probably going to baby step all of this and setup a test box minus the raid just to make sure I can get everything working before I start investing

Glad to help! I started my home server on a Pentium system with Debian years ago. You can get a lot of utility from an old system, especially if you're just trying to learn.

Good luck mate!

I started using ZFS on Linux 2 years ago and I didnt know anything about any of that stuff going into it. Looking back, It's simply one of the best and easiest to manage pieces of software I've ever used.

I can't see a reason to have a GUI to manage it personally.

Sample commands which is all I've ever needed.

Make pool:

zpool create tank raidz2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb ...

make datasets:

zfs create tank/dataset1 zfs create tank/dataset1/dataset2

zfs maintenance:

zpool scrub tank zpool replace /dev/sda /dev/sdb

Users, shares, etc can be done by installing Webmin on Proxmox if you still wanted that, but if not, setting up a user is as simple as adduser username. Sharing can be done in the Webmin, or copying a block in smb.conf and editing the path and the user lists or even with the built in SMB or NFS within ZFS.

zfs set sharesmb=on zfs set sharenfs=on

As far as memory. Sure ZFS will be limited to the ram you give the FreeNAS VM, or simply set the zfs_arc_max parameter to the same number and then ZFS wont take any more RAM than that, same result.

Just didn't seem worth the extra VM layer for my storage when it already couldn't really be easier to manage IMO.

Anyways, ZFS is a dream to manage from CLI.

What's normally the case is each distro does things a little differently (somes very differently). Webmin has been around for a long time and tries to unify the configuration interface irrespective of the distribution, but I'm not sure how popular it is nowadays.

The reason people (especially devs/admins) are usually asked to configure it by hand as opposed to using a GUI is so they understand the effect of their changes, as opposed to understanding that this button/checkbox/etc. on this specific GUI application did "something" to fix it. Of course there are even professional Linux users who prefer all GUI config tools, but I think most would rather have a deeper knowledge of what's happening on the system.

Plex is pretty straightforward to administer on Linux. I imagine that the web interface is very similar to what it is on widows PLUS you have access to configure files with a text editor. If SSH command line access seems daunting then consider webmin- I sometimes even use it for local system admin!

thanks for the reply. i spent a few hours reading around and have ended up on CentOS and using webmin to provide me with a front end for config purposes. I'll have a dhcp server with about 80 scopes many of which have unique configs. http://www.webmin.com/standard.html

i'll have a look round dnsmasq and i really like your script suggestion. cheers.

1. Buy a small computer (for Minecraft a NUC should be more than enough).
2. Install your distro of choice. Generally Debian is quite easy to setup for server because services are started as soon as they are installed, with working defaults out of the box (like sudo apt-get install openssh-server).
3. Either manage directly by ssh, or if you want a nice graphical interface, you may like to try http://www.webmin.com/

The server's ip is private, so I'm assuming it's behind a device doing NAT and, most likely, firewall. Why don't you just open the device up completely (either disabling iptables or make input/output accept rules)..

No sense overcomplicating things :)

But, if you feel you must... try this instead - save as 'iptables' in /etc/sysconfig/

*filter :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :INPUT DROP [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0]

-A INPUT -m conntrack -j ACCEPT --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

-A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 32400 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 32400 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 1900 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 32469 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 32469 -j ACCEPT COMMIT

Good luck!

PS: Check out webmin - It's got a TON of helpful features, and really makes things like iptables a lot easier.

This LXC panel makes it super easy to create/stop/start/clone containers, https://lxc-webpanel.github.io

Along with webmin, http://www.webmin.com, to do port forwarding to your containers (among other things).

Actually, I have a Deluge seedbox and use the "normal" GUI. Deactivate "classical mode" and you will get a connection manager with which you can connect to the remote machine. Looks like this and is awesome.

As with running a file server, I'd probably load a KVM VM with FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault in it. But there are a lot of server web interfaces (Ajenti, Webmin, ...) which can accomplish easy managing of file services and more.

Plex is pretty much one time configuration with 2 files. Or even less. It's manageable with the CLI and even has a web interface.

> Ubuntu with Unity... UI scaling set to about 1.5x works well to make everything readable from the couch.

The UI scaling was what I liked best about Unity, and other distros should really learn from it. Cinnamon is the only other that I've found which isn't too half-assed about it.

Otherwise I felt like Unity was designed for kids & grandmas. There are just far too few options built in. Want to do something basic like make user groups? Too bad. I mean, I like CLI tools, but A) they have a learning curve, B) I forget the details if I don't use them regularly (I don't love re-reading man pages for the fifth time), and C) being that this is a HTPC I'd prefer not do CLI for simple tasks that most other distros/OSes handle via GUI.

However that might all be moot since I just learned about webmin...

> To turn off the monitor, I have a shortcut pinned to the launcher that runs a script

Thanks for that :)

> Multiple user accounts seems like overkill for a media center; is there a reasoning for this?

Like I said, one for me as admin, and one shared account (which gets most of the use). Is there a way to auto-login the shared account? I'd hate to get rid of the password though unless there's a way to provide proper security without one.

> Logitech TK820

I've looked at that a number of times, but the reviews are always lower and the price is more than double the K400r. What do you like about it? Pretty solid build quality? Good touchpad hopefully?

> remote-control-sized gyro mouse

Huh? What model is that?

I know you said you got it solved. But I thought I'd add one more thing to the list.

Webmin. It creates a web based management interface with the computer. You can do just about any management tasks you want with it, it also has SSH and Terminal login connections. File management, Account management, services, logs...etc. If you have multiple computers you can also setup a group to work together so you can push updates across all of them. or just work with one at a time.

I can't speak to 50+ Linux machines, but I've really grown fond of Webmin - http://www.webmin.com/[1] ...I've found it helpful to "get a better handle" on Linux in some ways.

For monitoring, reporting, and inventory of what they're doing, how they're all performing, I'd consider Zenoss. Also a useful system for the rest of the environment, unless you already have another, similar setup going. Zabbix also looks nice.

Hope some of that is at least a little bit helpful :)

Sure.Let me point out that this will require Linux knowledge to the point of compiling some code. You need a Raspberry Pi (or not, any computer running Linux will do, but the Pi uses little to no power so....) and an USB modem with caller id support. Software wise a simple thing is http://jcblock.sourceforge.net/ that will just do black list and eventually white list, requires a little bit of compiling. Easy stuff, really. For ease of access via network, I also set up http://www.webmin.com/ but this is totally optional, I just like it.

Now, the guide is http://weeklytechforum.com/2013/03/28/block-unwanted-calls-with-a-raspberry-pi/ but beware: that modem is what is giving me trouble! It DOES support caller id, but in a way that is so incredibly unreliable, that I managed to test it twice, and it never reported the caller id afterwards. So, uh... probably avoid that specific one.

Good luck!

I run Webmin on my 2 single use VPSs and Webmin + Virtualmin on the server I use for hosting my clients.

Works well with a small footprint. Had never heard of CentOS Web Panel before and may try it out for giggles.

As others have said, SSH2 is a way to access the command line of a remote running Linux server. Linux, traditionally, doesn't have much in the way of a GUI when it comes to the server side of things. The down side to this is that you have to learn to manually edit config files and start/stop services by hand like "service apache restart". The up side to this though is that Linux just doesn't change much on the server side. I learned to work with Apache 20 years ago and it hasn't changed much over the years when it comes to setting it up and running it.

So the Linux server is harder to learn at first, but when you learn it you don't have to relearn it every decade. The knowledge stays useful for decades.

There are GUIs for Linux servers though. I'd recommend looking into installing Webmin(http://www.webmin.com/). If you're on Windows you'd first want to download Putty which will give you a Windows SSH2 client. From there you can login to your remote server's console and install webmind from the command line: http://www.webmin.com/deb.html

However if this is for a business I'd recommend hiring a part time Linux admin. I'm a freelance Linux admin and I have clients that pay me for 10, 20 or 40 hours a month and I run their servers for them. A good linux guy will make sure you have backups, monitoring and everything is setup securely for you and they can handle the day to day things that'll crop up.

cPanel is a paid for-product, which then goes and installs many daemon software on your server for you, and finally sets your server up with a web server that provides a web interface to configure it all.

Other free versions of this idea include ajenti, webmin and ISPConfig, in no particular order.

As other have said, singular-purpose linux servers shouldn't need a gui. The server only does one thing, learn how to manage that + linux itself.

That being said, most of my servers are multi-purpose and I use Webmin for basic management. It isn't pretty or anything, but it gets the job done, I can hop in real quick and make a simple changes without fuss, yet still be able to manually edit a config file via CLI if I need to do something the gui can't handle. I've never, for example, had Webmin alter my Apache configs in ways I didn't expect and it offers ways to edit most of the raw config files right from the GUI if you need to add a parameter that the gui has no option for.

Ah windows 8.... the toad of windows OS's. remote desktop? "sorry that feature is in another version" $49.99 please.

greyhole or hell, ubuntu will get you what you need. I actually never use the remote desktop feature unless i'm at work. this is what I use. http://imgur.com/a/oiRHC

it runs on windows too ... http://www.webmin.com/windows.html

I use webmin to configure my local office's DNS, it doesn't contain any guide or help, but the UI may be useful: then you could look up the generated configuration files in /etc/bind (at least on Ubuntu) and see the real meat :)

webmin...

Full disclosure, I've just switched back to nights and I'm not as sharp when working nights as when working days... also the sun is coming up so it's clearly time for me to go to sleep...

But I have a followup to your responses... you'll just have to give me a day ;)

http://www.webmin.com/index.html

I've always tried to run webmin to manage an instances i don't want to spend tons of time behind .. i'm pretty sure this will allow you to manage dovecot and postfix from the gui.