Webmin is a free & open source web-based control panel for Linux machines.

It provides a simple user interface to administrate the server. And, it’s available for all operating systems like CentOS, Ubuntu, etc.

But, installing Webmin for Centos 7 is quite tricky & you may get errors while configuring it.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to set up “Webmin for CentOS 7” as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we’ll see how our Support Engineers install Webmin on CentOS 7 and fix the related issues with it.

How to install Webmin for CentOS 7

The easiest way to install Webmin on CentOS 7 is to enable the Webmin repository & packages through the command line.

Let’s see how we install Webmin on CentOS 7 by following the steps below.

1. First, we update the packages & repository using this command:

yum -y update

2. Next, we run the following command to install the dependencies.

yum -y install perl perl-Net-SSLeay openssl perl-IO-Tty perl-Encode-Detect

3. Next, we open  nano /etc/yum.repos.d/webmin.repo to add the following lines:

[Webmin]
name=Webmin Distribution Neutral
#baseurl=http://download.webmin.com/download/yum
mirrorlist=http://download.webmin.com/download/yum/mirrorlist
enabled=1

4. And we import the Webmin GPG key using the following command:

rpm --import http://www.webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc

5. Then, we install the latest Webmin version.

yum install webmin

6. By default, Webmin listens on port 10000. So, we run the command to allow the port in the firewall.

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=10000/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

That’s how we install Webmin on CentOS 7 server.

Now, the user can access Webmin on https://Your_Server_IP:10000 with proper credentials.

Once logged into Webmin, you will see the following screen & you can manage the server interactively.

Troubleshooting common errors in installation

From our experience in managing Webmin servers, we often see errors reported by customers while installing Webmin in CentOS 7.

Let’s see how our Support Engineers figured it out.

1. ClamAV not installed

Recently, one of our customers approached us after installing Webmin, the wizard resulted in an error like this.

So our Support Engineers performed the following steps to solve the error.

1. First, we checked the clam repository by executing the command:

rpm -qa | grep -i clam

2. And we installed the packages by running this command:

yum install clamav-server-systemd.noarch clamav-scanner-systemd.noarch clamav-scanner.noarch

3. Next, we logged into Virtualmin & navigated to System Settings > Features and Plugins.

4. Then, we enabled the Virus Filtering feature.

5. Finally, we started the service to reflect the changes made.

systemctl start clamd@scan

That’s how we fixed the problem.

2. Database connection failure

Similarly, while installing Webmin, users set MySQL/MariaDB root password and when tried to access Webmin to login MySQL/MariaDB, it resulted in an error like:

DBI connect failed: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

To get around this error, we took the following steps.

1. Initially, we stopped the MariaDB service from the backend.

service mariadb stop

2. Then, we set the password for user ‘root’ by running the following command:

mysql -u root
> use mysql;
> update user set password=PASSWORD("****") where User='root';
> flush privileges;
> quit;

3. Finally, we restarted the service as:

service mariadb restart

That fixed the error & the user could access Webmin to login MySQL without any failure.

[Having trouble while installing Webmin for CentOS 7? We’ll fix it for you.]

Conclusion

To be more precise, installing Webmin for Centos 7 is quite tricky. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers installed Webmin on Centos 7 and fixed the related issues with it.