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Tag Archives: web

Ubuntu School – Get Rolling with Webmin on Ubuntu Server 11.10

Even if some Linux purists would have you believe the command-line is the only way to go, the pragmatist in me will always take an appropriate GUI over a complicated command-line any day. You can run a lot of powerful services for your home network using one or more Ubuntu server machines. With the right tools you don’t need to be a Linux expert to make that happen.

The tool of choice is Webmin. This is a set of web-based tools which allow you to control virtually every piece of server-side software on you Ubuntu server. The GUI is intuitive and straight-forward, the documentation is excellent, and the project is under active development.

Because Webmin isn’t in the standard repositories you will have to do a couple of quick command-line changes to configure your system to be able to find and download the apt package.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Once the file is open, add these lines to the bottom of the file

#########################

Package Sources for Webmin

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib

Those lines will add the necessary sources to apt for it to find the Webmin package. The Webmin package has also been digitally signed by its author. By default you will need to download the author’s key so that apt can use it to verify the Webmin package at install time. Fortunately, this is really easy to do.

wget http://webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc sudo apt-key add jcameron-key.asc

Now that all the prep work is done, it’s time to install Webmin.

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install webmin

All done! Now you can access administrative functions of your server’s services from the Webmin console: https://yourservername:10000/. This URL is also shown in the last few lines of the apt install details that are ouput to the command-line.

Redirecting Your Website (URL Redirection)

It’s late, and I’m tired, so this is gonna be a short post.  I got a question from @Mattoid12 on twitter tonight about how to redirect a website.  I’m going to show three ways, and then provide a link to a site which shows every conceivable way of redirecting a website.

.htaccess File

If you have access to edit your .htaccess file (FTP or SSH access to your server) put this line at the top.  It will redirect the local url “/” (root) to the new location.  More on HTTP 301 here.  I’ve discussed this in more detail on a previous post.

Redirect 301 / http://yournewwebsite.net/

HTML Meta Tag

The example below will redirect a page to the new location after two seconds.  This code should be placed at the top of your index or default page.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://yournewwebsite.net">

PHP Redirect

This method is sort of a combination of the above two approaches.  It will perform an instant redirect and return HTTP 301 to the browser.  This code needs to be entered in your index.php file.

<? Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); Header( "Location: http://yournewwebsite.net" ); ?>

For examples of a large number of other possible redirects are available on webconfs.com.