Control it with Webmin
Besides frittering away the hours watching media from the browser, we can also enact some serious system administration. Webmin is a web interface written in Perl that can administer all possible facets of your server. Opinions differ here, and of course all of this is possible through SSH, but some people prefer to not have to remember the syntax of a hundred disparate config files. With Webmin, these things are all controllable through a single, graphical point of contact.
As with Emby, we need to add keys and repos to ensure the software stays up to date: $ wget -qO - http://www.webmin.com/ jcameron-key.asc | sudo apt-key add - $ sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://download. webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib’>> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webmin-server. list”
Then it’s just a case of: $ sudo apt-get install webmin $ sudo systemctl start webmin
The default configuration starts a webserver in SSL mode, which means that when you go and visit the URL: https://192.168.1.100:10000
You’ll see a scary looking SSL error, since it’s impossible to get a valid certificate for private IP space. It’s safe to add an exception here, we’re only accessing it through our LAN and it’s advisable to keep it that way. With that out the way we can log in as our user and be able to carry out all manner of useful tasks, eg, we can configure our Samba shares (from the Servers menu), view log files, update packages, view resource usage, pretty much anything you can imagine.
Having this much power ( Webmin has root) in one place is a terrifying security prospect if that one place is facing the Internet. As such we really don’t recommend forwarding external traffic to Webmin without taking additional precautions. It’s entirely possible to tunnel traffic via SSH though, as mentioned in the dynamic DNS section earlier. Webmin allows you to use two-factor authentication via a number of providers, so that remote access can be done a little more prudently.
The Linux Raid section is particularly relevant for this tutorial: we can examine the health of our array, or take it offline for maintenance. If you set up Webmin soon after you created your array, you’ll be able to see that it’s still resyncing—the process takes ages even though it’s effectively just syncing a whole bunch of zeroes at this point. This information is also available in the file /proc/mdstat.