If its possible to install Webmin in ipfire and how.
I tried the official instructions and it doesnt work…apt install is not recognized…
Thanks
Webmin is a web based interface for system administration for Unix.
IPFire already has a WUI, Web User Interface, that is designed specifically to administrate all the functions in IPFire’s menus.
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I dont have too many time to study the WUI, but id like to install Webmin, as you can do many more things than just ipfire WUI, like a file system explorer, create users, delete users, install databases, update and upgrade system, dashboard with benchmarks, install uninstall packages etc…
I think it will take you much longer to learn how to build webmin from source to install it in IPFire than to learn how to use the WUI.
The following link gives you the information on what is required to do a build of an addon from source.
https://wiki.ipfire.org/devel/ipfire-2-x/addon-howto
You would also need to learn how to modify the webmin source code to tell it where to access all the files it needs, before you build it from source as IPFire is not one of the distributions that webmin knows anything about. IPFire is a specially created Firewall Distribution and is not based on any of the distributions that webmin has listed.
I would urge you to take the time to learn how to use the WUI. This has been specially created to administrate the special requirements of IPFire and its file structure.
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Well i thought that ipfire was based on debian, so you could install/uninstall any software like Debian…
Then as a teacher in educational vocation, id ask to add webmin as a package, as students usually have problems to use terminal ( they are used to windows environments)…and something like webmin where you can edit files, create users, move/copy files, update packages would be nice…
Seems that the addon has to be made by some developer as its difficult to follow…i could compile source the old way, but adapt it to ipfire is out of my knowledge.
Thanks
Hi,
Many add-ons are available trough Pakfire: wiki.ipfire.org - Add-ons
But I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to achieve.
As a teacher, you surely know that a firewall/security gateway should offer as little attack surface as possible. Installing third-party packages and adding users does the exact opposite.
I think it would be better if you run an unmodified IPFire system as a firewall and provide a seperate Debian server for your students to experiment with.
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IPFire based on Linux From Scratch, not Debian.
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Hi all,
some of what you are looking for is also possible with Midnight Commander → wiki.ipfire.org - mc only with Ncurses but may also OK for some rudimentary things ?
Best,
Erik
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File inspection and editing is also possible with WinSCP. This program runs on the client and therefore uses the graphical possiblities of that computer ( including clicking around 
).
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Did just a little inspection into the install code of webmin and looked a bit into the documentation.
- webmin seems to be mostly Perl code; install/setup is basically copying the modules to the installation directory
- modules implement the knowledge about administration and documentation of the system parts
To my first impression webmin is just another approach to access the system. Our approach is the WebGUI and the shell access ( with a possible support by file managers like WinSCP ).
Both approaches can’t eliminate the necessity to know the basics about an operating system and networking.
Both approaches allow misuse because the operations are run as root. So the security weakness on both systems is the concealment of the access data ( IPFire: root pw, admin pw ; webmin: the varoius user pws ).
Whether webmin can be applied directly to IPFire, I didn’t research.
But I think it is worth to discuss such an alternate user interface in the dev community. This implies active participation in a potential implementation.
Webmin was long time ago a helping hand for setting up Apache and PHP, just speaking for myself. Setting up Accounts where handy but currently am not sure what it should bring on an IPFire platform.
Best,
Erik
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Just one further thought.
There is a difference between IPFire and the way webmin administers the system.
IPFire is designed to do administration through the WebGUI. This system holds the state in various settings files ( mainly named just as this ). The systems config files are written by the WebGUI programs to reflect this state.
webmin writes these files directly. Maybe there is a state data base also, didn’t look thus deep into.
Using webmin on IPFire may result in an inconsistent system state ( just if you edit config files directly ). IPFire tries to avoid this situation by the concept of including xxx.local files, holding definitions not handled by the WebGUI.
Regards,
Bernhard
EDIT: Moved to right category.
In my opinion, webmin is widely used…so people would take less time in getting familiar with ipfire.
Webmin allow create, delete users and groups.
Webmin has a integrated file explorer ( with copy, paste, rename…and also edit text files)
Webmin has some benchmarks…
My look is from educational point of view, not profesional. I told in other post that students not used to terminal in first course, using web interface helps them a lot.
Would be nice to include webmin as pakfire addon.
Thanks
Hi,
if I may comment on that one: Neither IPFire in particular nor any security product in general can shed the load from you to gain knowledge on what you are doing. Expecting you to get familiar with IPFire’s web interface if you intend to use IPFire really is not a great deal - gaining some knowledge on network security and firewalling would be even better.
To quote from this blog post:
RTFM - your adversaries will do as well
Let’s face it: People do not read manuals, at least they do not like to do so. Anybody is in a hurry, so some search engine queries here, a little copy & paste there and restarting things if they do not work probably will do.
In most cases, it will. However, when it comes to a firewall, this creates a false sense of security (which is worse than having no security at all), since you have no idea what you were doing and why. Elsewhere people call something like that “security by obscurity”. In this case, you are hiding your networks’ vulnerabilities from yourself.
A considerable amount questions asked at the IPFire community portal can be solved by just pointing people to IPFire’s documentation. Your adversaries will have read those. They probably know you and your system inside-out.
If you care about security - and even if you don’t -, go read the f***ing manual.
Nobody can do this for you. The more you know about your infrastructure, the better you can decide what steps are necessary to protect it, and what is going to happen if you enable or disable certain things.
In other words: If you cannot or do not want to afford the time to at least skim through the projects’ wiki, please consider not to run a firewall: Having a false sense of security is worse than having no security at all.
Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller
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