Welcome to Webmin Administrator's Cookbook. This book provides over a hundred practical recipes for solving real-world system administration tasks through a convenient tool called Webmin.

Running an internet-connected private server used to be expensive and available mainly to larger companies who either hired professional sysadmins or outsourced administration. Thanks to the wide adoption of virtualization software, efficient private servers have now become available to anyone with the right skills. Whether you're a developer trying to optimize the performance of your web application or you're a startup looking to implement new software architecture for your systems, chances are you'll need to configure and run your own servers.

Few things are as valuable as having the right tools for a job, and Webmin is a great addition to your toolbox. It allows you to get your server up and running quickly, monitor its state, and be notified by e-mail when the server needs your attention. Webmin simplifies many system administration tasks by abstracting away the complexity of the system command and configuration file syntax, replacing them with a friendly graphical web interface.

Webmin is very lightweight for a GUI application because it doesn't require a desktop environment to be running on your system. You also don't need complex desktop sharing solutions to use it. Since it is a web application, all you need to make full use of Webmin is a browser. Its web nature also makes Webmin resilient to slow or unstable Internet connections. Overall, it's a great tool for administering servers remotely.