You might search for a way to add a new user to your Webmin without bothering using the Webmin user interface or you simply prefer using shell for adding the new user to Webmin just like I do.
1.In order to manually add a new user to webmin you will have to edit webmin’s /etc/webmin/miniserv.users which is the default miniserv.uesrs location in many Linux distributions, however in FreeBSD or other BSDs the miniserv.users file location would probably be /usr/share/etc/webmin/ or /usr/share/webmin/etc , anyways if you are adding the new user manually open the file and copy paste the line:
root:12ZWQKVLjpihs:0
to a new line, where you will have to modify the line substituting root with newusername , like so:
newusername:12ZWQKVLjpihs:0
Afterwards you will have to also edit the file /etc/webmin/webmin.acl and likewise copy paste the definitions allowing access to all recources to the root user which in webmin.acl by default are:
root: acl adsl-client apache at backup-config bacula-backup bandwidth bind8 burner cfengine change-user cluster-copy cluster-cron cluster-passwd cluster-shell cluster-software cluster-useradmin cluster-usermin cluster-webmin cpan cron custom dfsadmin dhcpd dnsadmin dovecot exim exports fdisk fetchmail file filter firewall frox fsdump grub heartbeat htaccess-htpasswd idmapd inetd init inittab ipfilter ipfw ipsec jabber krb5 ldap-client ldap-server ldap-useradmin lilo logrotate lpadmin lvm mailboxes mailcap majordomo man mon mount mysql net nis openslp package-updates pam pap passwd phpini postfix postgresql ppp-client pptp-client pptp-server procmail proc proftpd pserver qmailadmin quota raid samba sarg sendmail sentry servers shell shorewall smart-status smf software spam squid sshd status stunnel syslog syslog-ng system-status tcpwrappers telnet time tunnel updown useradmin usermin vgetty webalizer webminlog webmin wuftpd xinetd
In my case I wanted to add to the newly created newuser only acl privileges for user crontab modification and htaccess-passwd creation thus I have included in the webmin.acl file only:
newuser: cron webmin htaccess-passwd
You will also be required to change the new user webmin password to some password of your choice, to attain that in Debian Linux execute:
debian:~# /usr/share/webmin/changepass.pl /etc/webmin newusername type_your_password
On Fedora and other RPM (Redhat based linux distros) the webmin changepass.pl user password change script is located in /usr/libexec/webmin/changepass.pl therefore if you’re about to change the password for the new user on Fedora and alike, type:
fedora:~# /usr/libexec/webmin/changepass.pl /etc/webmin/ newusername your_password
In the above change password exapmles you need to substitute newusername with the user chosen to be the new username as explained earlier in the post.
Finally in order for the newly added user with the respectively configured permissions to start working in Webmin, you will have to reload the webmdaemon. In most linux distributions (including Debian), to restart webmin you will have to issue:
linux-shell:~# /etc/init.d/webmin restart
However if you’re looking for a bit more automated way instead of manually editting the miniserv.users and webmin.acl files.
2. Herein is a tiny shell script I’ve written which facilitates the new webmin user creation under a console / terminal / shell
I have written webmin-new-user.sh just for fun, and it could be greatly improved, so don’t expect too much from it it doesn’t do any checks on the input given to the script, so be sure to pass a correct input as required from the dialogs in order to be able to use the script to add new users to your webmin from bash or any other unix shell.
The script is written to work with Debian on Fedora and other rpm based distributions as well as BSD a minor tunings within the script might be necessary to make the script work.
Please leave feedback on the script if it is of any use to you 🙂
