PIXILAB Wiki

Introducing Webmin

Most services on a Linux server are at their core enabled and configured using various text files. As those can be hard to find, and even harder to modify in the proper way, a web based graphical user interface is provided, called Webmin. This is already installed in the Linux server image.

The Webmin user interface can be accessed remotely, over the network, using a web browser. However, enabling webmin requires local access through a terminal window. So you may want to do this as part of your initial setup, while you have a keyboard connected to the server. Once this first step has been done, remaining configurations can all be done through the browser-based user interface.

To enable webmin, do as follows:

  1. Start your Blocks server with screen and keyboard connected.
  2. Wait for it to log in as the pixi-server user.
  3. Open a terminal window using the icon in the dock on the left hand side.
  4. Type the following three commands into the terminal window, one at a time (some commands requires you to enter the password you assigned to the pixi-admin user in "First Start").
su pixi-admin
sudo systemctl enable webmin
sudo systemctl start webmin

The first of those commands switches the terminal session to the pixi-admin user. This is required as the pixi-server user doesn't have the necessary privileges to enable system-level services. The second command enables and starts webmin.

Now, using another computer connected to the same network, open a web browser and type the following into the address bar (where nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn is the IP address of your Blocks server) : 

https://nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn:10000

Alternatively, you may access webmin from a brower started on the server itself by typing https://localhost:10000 into the address bar.

:!: You may see a warning message when first accessing webmin. This warning is caused by the kind of certificate used by webmin to encrypt the communication. You need to convince your web browser that this is normal, asking it to store a certificate exception for this server, thereby avoiding this warning in the future.

The start screen of webmin shows some basic information about your server.