Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Hour 9: GUI Administration Tools
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Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours |
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Hour 9: GUI Administration Tools |
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Webmin is a Web-based system administration package for UNIX systems. It provides facilities for managing Samba, as well as setting up accounts, configuring DNS, configuring Apache, configuring sendmail, and performing many other system administration tasks. Here you concentrate on how Webmin helps with configuring Samba.
Webmin consists of a miniature Web server written in Perl and a set of CGI programs that implement the functions required to provide system configuration over the Web. To use Webmin you must obtain Webmin and install it.
Webmin can be obtained from http://www.webmin.com/webmin/. When you have obtained Webmin, you need to break out the gzipped tar file that it is distributed as. A command sequence such as the following does the job:
gzip -d webmin-VER_tar.gz tar -xvf webmin-VER_tar
On some systems, simply using tar -zxvf webmin-VER_tar.gz does the job as well. In both of the previous commands, replace VER with the current version of Webmin. At the time of writing, the latest version of Webmin was 0.65.
After breaking out the distribution, simply change to the directory you just created, usually webmin-VER, where VER is the version number of Webmin. You should then read the README file for installation instructions. At the time of writing, this consists of running the following command:
./setup.sh
Answer the questions asked by the installation script. During installation, you are asked for a password for the first Webmin user, admin. This password is needed when you connect to the Webmin page.
Webmin currently supports the following operating systems:
For more complete details of the operating systems supported by Webmin, consult the Webmin Web page and installation script.
After installing and starting Webmin, you can access it from your favorite browser (as shown in Figure 9.11) by accessing port 10,000 on the server you installed Webmin on. If you changed the port number that Webmin sits behind from the default of 10,000, you should use your number rather than 10,000.
Figure
9.11
Connecting to Webmin.
When you have entered the correct username and password, you are presented with the Webmin home page as shown in Figure 9.12. Webmin can administer many aspects of UNIX systems, but you are interested only in its capability to administer Samba. To perform Samba-related configuration, select the File Shares for Windows Networking link on the Webmin main page.
Again, you should be aware that Webmin does not provide support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), so you are submitting usernames and passwords in the clear over the network. This is a security problem, and at the very least you should not enable people to administer your Samba servers via the Internet.
Figure
9.12
The Webmin main page.
After you select File Shares for Windows Networking, Webmin presents the Samba Exports page, as shown in Figure 9.13. From this page, you can manage file and printer shares, as well as all aspects of the Samba global parameters. You can select global configuration sections by clicking on the icons at the bottom of Figure 9.13.
From these pages, you can perform the same set of functions as you can with SWAT.
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Note - Webmin does not create file shares with hyphens (-) in them and does not work with smb.conf files that have include parameters in them. |
Figure
9.13
The Webmin Samba Exports page.
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Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours |
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Hour 9: GUI Administration Tools |
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