Webmin is a web hosting control panel to manage Linux servers.

Miniserv is the web server application that handles the Webmin Web applications.

By default, Miniserv uses SSL for HTTP connections. But with this default settings, we’ve seen some errors while accessing Webmin panel.

However, we can disable SSL in Webmin by editing the Miniserv configuration file.

Today, we’ll see the reason why our Support Engineers disable SSL in Webmin control panel and fix the related issue.

The reason for disabling SSL in Webmin

Let’s look at the reason to disable SSL and how our Support Engineers disabled them.

Wrong settings in Webmin configuration file

Recently, one of our customers had reported us with a problem after Webmin installation on Linux and when they try to access Webmin using URL <http://SERVER IP ADDRESS:10000/> via browser it shows an errors like this.

"The Web Server is running in SSL mode. Try the URL https://SERVER IP ADDRESS:10000/ instead."

or

Error - Bad Request This web server is running in SSL mode.

This is because by default Miniserv web server runs in SSL mode. So, to fix this problem we disabled SSL from server backend by performing the below steps.

1. First, we login to the server via SSH.

2. Edit the Miniserv web server configuration file “/etc/webmin/miniserv.conf” using vi editor.

3. Locate the code ssl=1 and change the value to 0 in “/etc/webmin/miniserv.conf” file.

4. Save the configuration file.

5. Finally, we restart the service.

service webmin restart

As an alternate option, we can disable SSL mode in Webmin control panel by just doing the following steps like.

1. Login to Webmin control panel

2. Then, click on SSL Encryption under Webmin Configuration.

3. Finally, select the “Enable SSL if available?” to No and click save.

Thus, with SSL disabled the customer can access the Webmin application over a standard HTTP connection without any fail.

A common error after disabling SSL

Sometimes, disabling SSL properly doesn’t really work while accessing Webmin. It shows an error like

To fix this error we always recommend clearing the browser cache, cookies before accessing the Webmin control panel without https.

Also, another step we take to clear the cache is editing the configuration file.

This is done by adding the code no_testing_cookie=1 in /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf file and finally, restart the service.

[Having trouble while disabling SSL in Webmin? We’ll fix it for you.]

Conclusion

To be more precise, with SSL enabled settings in Webmin configuration file results in error while accessing the Webmin control panel. Today, we saw why we disable SSL and how our Support Engineers fixed the related error.