Use a GUI tool for system management - revisited

Nov 02, '01 09:59:40AM

Contributed by: robg

Back in December of 2000, I published an article about using Webmin as a web-based administrative tool for OS X. At that time, OS X wasn't directly supported, and not all features worked as expected. Read the original article for an overview of the Webmin feature, but basically, it puts full control of most of the UNIX command-line applications (configure Apache, FTP, etc.) into a browser-based interface.

At some point in the release cycle, Webmin added support for both OS X and OS X Server, which means that everything works as expected under OS X. Installation is trivial; download the package, put it where you want it to run from, and then type

sudo ./setup.sh
to run the setup script. You can use the default answers to every question, just make sure you pick the correct OS from the list (OS X is number 40). It even supports versions 10.0.x and 10.1. It even comes with a nice uninstaller. Just type
sudo /etc/webmin/uninstall.sh
and it will stop the server and remove itself from your system.

I highly recommend Webmin as an easy way to administer the UNIX side of Mac OS X. Be careful, however, as you can easily change some things that may have unintended consequences ... that's the downside of easy access to everything!

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20011102095940695