One of my friend brought an unmanaged VPS, mainly because they are cheaper than the managed ones, but you need to be a bit of a geek to set it up to host web services. My reasons for liking Unmanaged VPS are different, number one being, you can customize it as you want it, you can harden(secure) the server according to your requirements.

I could go ahead and explain how you could install the OS (not necessary CentOS, but any Linux flavor) but that would maybe happen in some future articles but here we are going to learn how to install Webmin, which is of-course, the free alternate to CPanel.

Webmin is one of the best Open source control panel and here goes the official description

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.

In short, once you have a control panel setup, you don’t need to go to the CLI (Command line interface) to get all your works done, so if you want to add a Mysql Database server or even Ngnix, everything could be managed via the control panel, this reduces the complexity of the setup by 50%, but the rest 50% will also be tough if you are a newbie or new to Linux and it’s command

Let’s cut the crap and start with the procedure

1. Install dependencies

For CentOS 5.1(or lower) we need to install few dependencies. Just connect to your server through SSH and use the following command:

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on a Linux or a Mac type the following in the terminal window

ssh login@serverip

on a Windows Box, Use puTTY (FREE Telnet and SSH client)

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yum -y install perl-Net-SSLeay

This is not required if you have CentOS 5.2 and above, they already come with it

2. Install Webmin

i. Change the directory

#cd /usr/src

ii. Download Webmin Package from their website using wget magic

#wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.520-1.noarch.rpm

you can change the filename to the latest version if you wish, alternatively, you can update it once the setup is complete

iii. Install the rpm

#rpm -i webmin-1.520-1.noarch.rpm

Voila!!!

3. Open Webmin

To access Webmin, type ip-address-of-your-server:10000, 10000 is the default port, webmin runs on.

If you’ve done everything correctly, you will be presented with a welcome screen.

Additionally, you can install Virtualmin and Usermin along with Webmin, how to do it? Some more article about it coming soon.

Also, this is not all, you would need to install, Apache, PHP, MYSQL database server, BIND NS Server and a few more stuff in order to get it to work as a complete WEB Server, We shall be writing an article about that soon.

The DNetWorks Team