Webmin for Raspberry PI

Would really like to see webmin for Raspberry Pi !! Thin servers are getting very popular.

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A couple of people have tried it, but reported pretty poor performance (mainly due to disk slowness).

Which linux distro is typically used on the Pi?

How about a dumb down version... just user/groups bind, Apache, php and package updating ?

So doesn't the regular Webmin debian package work then?

The install script won't work

Ok I got webmin installed and running on Raspberry PI3 and its working really good. I installed via the deb package since the install script would not work but its non issue since no one should be using it to host websites.. although straight html with some basic php seems to be working rather well. I wouldn't suggest to use it for any database usage.

Bind is working really well as a secondary since that uses very little bandwidth and cpu cycles.

Now can webmin be updated from the webmin sarge repo ?

What went wrong with the install script exactly? I'd test this myself, but I don't have a Pi system.

I don't remember off hand but it didn't seem to matter when I installed webmin via the deb package. Its working as intended and that's what matters right ?

Yeah .. I don't think webmin really needs to do anything special at all to support the PI.

I might tinker with the install script when I get another PI and fix the script to support the arm architecture if you don't object.

Debian, as in Vanilla Debian, isn't the main OS for the Raspberry Pi. Debian can be used but currently has some difficulties due to non-free firmware blobs. Raspbian, a modified Debian specifically built for Raspberry Pi, is what is mainly used. It has its own repositories and it is built by the Raspbian community on a Debian base. https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/

I tried to install Virtualmin the other day (Friday, it is now Sunday) and the only way to do it is via the deb packages but that leaves alot of configuring for the user to do. Installing via the deb packages and configuring isn't difficult but it is time consuming and alot of people would give up. If the Virtualmin install script could be modified to support Raspbian it would be good.

Joe's picture
Submitted by Joe on Sun, 04/22/2018 - 18:55 Pro Licensee

Virtualmin install script definitely won't work on the Pi (or any non-x86 architecture), as a number of binary packages will be missing. Webmin probably is trivial to make work on just about any Linux, particularly one based on an already supported distribution. Virtualmin is a lot more complicated (just because of the dependencies, not because of anything specific about Virtualmin).

If I tweaked the script enough to get it working would you include it in the future ?

I'll maintain it if you do.

@ Joe, a quick question for you. What binary packages are missing from Raspbian that Virtualmin requires? Raspbian packages are built from Debian sources and as far as I am aware most of the Debian repository has been packaged by Raspbian.

I am a very new user to the Webmin and Virtualmin projects but have a lot of experience with Raspberry Pis and own a four-pi cluster that I want to run Vmin on. Now I'm going to tell you what I did with my Pis and Webmin/Virtualmin. Keep in mind I had preconfigured the Pi by installing Ubuntu Server 20.04.10 on it. This version of Ubuntu was preinstalled on the .img file and is using the armhf architecture and it's 32-bit. After writing the image to all the four Pis I edited the network-config file in the system-boot partition so the Pis would use 1.1.1.1 DNS and have a static IP set by netplan.io software. I set the hostname to an FQDN and created a user of my name and added it to the sudo group. I then set up ssh keys and ran updates on the system. I first installed Wmin from its website. I downloaded the deb and installed it via apt. (sudo apt install ./webmin_version_all.deb) it worked and I was able to get to Webmin via port 10000 using the Pi's local IP address. I went over to freedns.afraid.org which provides a shared registry of domains I can put a subdomain on; there I set an A record so the FQDNs I set earlier would point to the private IPs of my Pis. I then tried using the Letsencrypt form on Wmin but it didn't work because it said there was no virtualhost set up for that host. I decided to use Certbot myself and downloaded it via the software packages form and ran the commands via the online shell. After getting a cert I used the shell to find the keys and list them and then I copied the keys to the clipboard and uploaded them via Wmin's cert upload form. SSL started working, and I changed FreeDNS to use my router's public IP, which port forwarded Pi #1 on ports 80, 443, and 10000. Everything was working and then I went to link my other Pis, and this is where the trouble started. I first found the other pis through a scan of the network and edited them with the right user and pass. Then I went over to cluster settings to add them there. It didn't work though, and complained about SSL. I didn't feel like doing SSL again on all the Pis because I wanted the three workers to be isolated from the web and to be fair SSL is just sort of annoying for me. I decided to leave the cluster settings be and instead install Vmin. I got the web address of the .wmd file and put that into Wmin and it installed the Vmin module. I thought I was done but It instead asked me to do post-install config. When I tried to get to the dashboard it said some Postfix error and I hadn't even installed Postfix. The post-install config failed for a lot of reasons which I don't remember and won't list here, and I decided to uninstall Vmin and do the cluster thing since I actually knew how to do it. I deleted the Vmin module and everything worked again. In the process of getting Certbot downloaded on the other three Pis, I left them overnight and when I came back in the morning my server was inaccessible through Webmin and only through SSH. I connected and checked the status of everything. systemctl status returned fine and there were no big errors in the error log. I still don't know what happened but I'm wiping the system and trying the manual install shown in the Vmin docs. That's pretty much my story, and one note, the Webmin docs that are supposedly located at doxfer.webmin.com/docs just hang forever loading when I try to visit them. Don't know what it is, but it doesn't work. Thanks for reading this long comment if you have any questions about my experience running Webmin/Virtualmin on four Raspberry Pis please ask, there doesn't seem to be too many posts on this.