How to setup domain name for webmin access

Question

I want to access webmin through domain name like

webmin.example.com

instead of

127.0.0.1:10000.

How i can achieve this using apache virtual hosting?

Answer 1

This is probably a bad idea. Why do you want to do this and how do you plan to secure it? Doing so will give anyone access to your webmin - a product known for security flaws.

It would be better to access it via using an ssh tunnel

ssh -L 8000:localhost:10000 webmin.example.com

Then visit

http://localhost:8000

in your web browser.

If you really want to do this, you can probably configure webmin to listen directly on a different port or you can use the apache mod_proxy to setup a proxy to it.

Answer 2

This is covered in the Webmin documentation here:

http://doxfer.com/Webmin/UnderApache#Webmin_Proxied_Through_Apache

This is just standard proxying stuff, and any documentation covering Apache proxying would also cover this kind of thing. It isn't unique to Webmin, at all, as it runs under a standards compliant HTTP web server (miniserv.pl, which also has a number of additional security features, as well as application server features, built-in to make Webmin safer and more efficient).

mechcow is completely incorrect about running Webmin proxied through Apache being "insecure". Webmin would still require authentication, and most security features will still work fine.

I will note, however, that if you have an IP address to spare, you can make Webmin listen on that IP on port 443, rather than proxying, assuming you configure Apache to explicitly only listen on the IPs you don't want Webmin running on. In this way, Webmin can be reached with just the domain name (no port needed).

And, the domain name is irrelevant to Webmin. You need to setup your DNS or hosts file to resolve the name to the IP of the Webmin server.

One more random thought:

You do want to use SSL, regardless of how you set this up (whether proxying or running on port 443 on a specific IP address). You'll be logging into Webmin with root-level credentials, and if you're doing it over the Internet (rather than localhost), it's not safe to send those unencrypted.