CONTROL IT WITH WEBMIN
Besides frittering away 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 all of this is possible through SSH, of course, but some people prefer not to 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 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 web server in SSL mode, which means that when you go and visit the URL https://192.168.1.100:10000, you see a scary-looking SSL error, because 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 of the way, we can log in as our user, and be able to carry out all manner of useful tasks. For example, 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 enables you to use twofactor 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 guide: 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 resynching— the process takes ages, even though it’s effectively just synching a whole bunch of zeroes at this point. This information is also available in the /proc/mdstat file.