I installed Ubuntu on a second machine earlier this week as a small file server as I'm gearing up to format and reinstall my main computer. As normal with my Linux servers it will run headless with just a power cord and a network cable attached.
One thing I cheat with on my headless machines (at home, never on a production server) is installing Webmin. It is great if you know what you are doing since Webmin gives you an incredible amount of power. I SSHed into the box and fired off the aptitude command to install Webmin.
There is no Webmin package in the Ubuntu repositories. I have no idea why, but it is not there. So, who do you get it installed?
It's not terribly hard as there is a Debian package available from the Webmin people but there are a few dependencies. Drop to a terminal and issue these following commands:
$ sudo aptitude install libnet-ssleay-perl libauthen-pam-perl libio-pty-perl libmd5-perl
$ wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin_1.420_all.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.420_all.deb_1.420_all.deb
The first line installs all the dependencies that will be needed. The second line grabs the debian file from Sourceforge, and the last line actually installs it onto your system. If the Internap server is slow for you, check out here to find other mirrors.
Webmin runs its own internal web server so there is nothing left to set up. Head to:
https://
and log in with a root user or a user with sudo access. Yes, that previous line is incredibly scary and this is why I would never think of using it on a production machine. Webmin needs this level of authority because it allows you to alter just about any service on the computer, installs packages, and a host of other things right out of the box.