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Dean Rather
Asked: 2012-06-23 17:53:24 +0800 CST

Create Webmin user for an EC2 Instance

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I've setup an Amazon EC2 Instance, using the Ubuntu 12.04 AMI (ubuntu/images/ebs/ubuntu-precise-12.04-amd64-server-20120424 (ami-a29943cb)), and I'd like to get Webmin working (so I can setup a DNS).

After following the installation instructions on Webmin's site, the installer says I can login with any username/pass of a user who has superuser access.

The problem is that the EC2 instance only has 1 user "ubuntu", which can only login using SSH keys -- not a password!

I've tried creating users manually and I can't login as those users (even via SSH), so I think it might be a permission thing provided by the AMI.

Does anyone know the best way around setting up a login to my webmin?

ubuntu amazon-ec2 amazon-ami ubuntu-12.04

5 Answers

  1. Setup password for root with "passwd root" and login as it over SSL. If you want to host website you might try virtualmin.

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  2. Create a simple user with password having sudo permissions as shown below. You can login to webmin using this user.

    sudo useradd -g sudo webmin
sudo passwd webmin

    Make sure you choose a strong password as this is the sudo user. Refer here for details.

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  3. Best Answer

    Andrew Smith is correct, but has an unnecessary step in his suggestion. You don't actually need to login to ssh with a password for Webmin to work; ssh and Webmin are unrelated services. Simply set a password for your root, or sudo ALL capable user, and that will be the way you login to Webmin.

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  4. Ok, so the reason you can't log in to the instance with anything other than a key is probably the sshd_config has PasswordAuthentication no

    Change that to yes.

    Then create a user and a password for that user and it might work.

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  5. Create a webmin user password like so: /usr/libexec/webmin/changepass.pl /etc/webmin root YOURPASSWORD. Then you can login as "root" with the password you set without adding a system-wide password to your machine root user.

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