# I need Webmin advice



## Phishfry (Mar 31, 2016)

I am considering building or improving on modules in sysutils/webmin for net/hostapd and dns/dnsmasq to add features. I am not a programmer but want to dig in somewhere and it seems reasonable and doable.

Does anybody have any advice. Is Webmin too old and stale to waste my time on? I want to administer my FreeBSD wireless AP under Webmin but the hostapd module only has SSID and passphrase as options. I have been spoiled by pfSense's RRD graphs and want to add some simple features to the webmin module.

I can't seem to find any similar software that suits my taste as many "Web Control Panels" seem more oriented twords Web site hosting and databases. Am I missing another killer web front end? I looked at bootstrap but I did not like the approach.

I want to learn programming but never envisioned learning CGI and Perl. Guess you need to crawl before you can walk.

Thanks for your advice.


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## shepherdAZ (Mar 31, 2016)

You may have seen it already, but there is a high-level comparison of various options at http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/cpanel-vs-plesk-vs-webpanel/. It looks like many of them use PHP.


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## SirDice (Apr 1, 2016)

Phishfry said:


> I am considering building or improving on modules in sysutils/webmin for net/hostapd and dns/dnsmasq to add features. I am not a programmer but want to dig in somewhere and it seems reasonable and doable.


If you're not an experienced programmer I suggest finding another project to start with. Webmin is often installed by inexperienced users and is a frequent cause of security breaches. Even for experienced programmers it's difficult to program a web application in a secure way. As a novice you are likely to make the same mistakes, inadvertently opening up a web application for exploitation.


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## wblock@ (Apr 1, 2016)

Using the FreeNAS (or pfSense) web interface might be a better way.  SirDice said about webmin what I was thinking.

There was a project several years ago to separate the FreeNAS web interface into a separate project (port).  It was presented at BSDCan 2012.


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## Phishfry (Apr 1, 2016)

Thanks everyone for that unique perspective I had not even considered Security or my lack of knowledge concerning it. My personal AP is behind pfSense so I  rely on that for an upstream firewall and use WPA2 with wpa_supplicant on my AP.
My though was that I was just providing command prompt echo's from hostapd to the web-gui. I will rethink this project now. I need to look at what perl_ssl module actually does.

I am being unfair calling Webmin stale. They have regular releases. Not alot of fresh modules being added though.
That said it does not change much and it just works. I really enjoy the cross platform compatibility.
The authentic theme looks modern. I guess I need to look at Webmins security record.

shepherdAZ@ -I did find that comparison page and cpanel and a few others look good but no wireless AP support at all, that I can find.


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