A few months ago I bought a license of Windows Home Server to the home server pc I built (see this post). My first encounter with WHS was terrible I did a stupid mistake and I almost delete every single file I had.
The second encounter was much better and every thing was running fine until I noticed here at home and confirmed in the web that WHS is not green and everything was always running at full speed, even when I’m not using it.
So I start looking for alternatives and I saw a project called Amahi that basically It’s a Linux home server with steroids (lots of options and software) and runs on top of Fedora.
I decided not to continue with Amahi, for a few reasons, and started looking for a simple OS that allows me to share files and alternatively have a source control, some databases and then I tested two. One was FreeNas and the other was Ubuntu Server. Since I’m a Ubuntu fan I decided to give a try and create a VM with Ubuntu server + SSH + Apache + MySql + Php (LAMP). Note FreeNas is also very good and it has a impressive web UI.
My first impression wasn’t good because the UI of Ubuntu Server It’s just command line. Alternatively I could install gnome by running this command line: sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
But since I want something simple I decided to continue with the command line but needed something visual that could help me configure the home server. I search around and found Webmin.
Webmin has a demo and lots of screenshots here and Webmin it’s spectacular, a very good web user interface that allows me to configures almost the entire home server and that was just what I needed.
Install Webmin is very simple I just need to run this:
- On my computer I opened a command line and run the command ssh [serverIP] and login.
- By doing this I’m now able to run commands on the server. Then I just did
- sudo apt-get install perl libnet-ssleay-perl openssl libauthen-pam-perl libpam-runtime libio-pty-perl libmd5-perl
- To install a few dependecies and the this
- wget http://www.webmin.com/download/deb/webmin-current.deb
- To download the Webmin, and then since the latest version is 1.500 I just need to run this command
- sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.500_all.deb
Now I that I have Webmin Installed I just need to open a browser to the URL https://[serverIP]:10000 and I have a UI that allows me to configure my server.
After given a test in a VM I decided definitely to switch from WHS to Ubuntu server with SSH and LAMP and I don’t regret my decision.
Next post will be about install and configure Subversion and WebSvn on Ubuntu Server… And yes my home server also have a source control.