I set it up for my handrolled homelab server automation ( all Arch Linux servers ), back when I was doing everything with virsh.<p>It worked "ok". It required pulling in a bunch of dependencies I wouldn't have normally installed. I had it set up behind an HAproxy LB, with ssl terminated at the LB. When I was using it ~1 year ago, it was pretty buggy, and certain components would crash and I would have to restart the web page.<p>Overall it was a mediocre experience, but I suppose better than having to ssh into every server. The main pain point was that I still had to go in to every server, and install cockpit.<p>In the end, I ended up just moving on to Proxmox. But I suppose cockpit is nice if you don't want a centrally managed cluster, but still want a web interface.
If curious see also<p><i>Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612</a> - Feb 2018 (148 comments)
Has anyone tried to use this stuff at a scale of greater than a dozen servers? I briefly tried it in my homelab on CentOS 8, and immediately hit enough weirdness that I'm just back to SSH with Ansible now.<p>I suppose having a GUI can be nice for a health overview of your infrastructure, but in general I dislike GUIs for actual administrative work, since using them is a practice that steers you away from automation.<p>Most GUI tools don't provide you very good ways to make "atomic" changes, which is made very easy if you run your automation from a git repository, since the final review before hitting go is just "git diff".
Friends don't let friends configure linux from a web UI. It's messy, built off of assumptions, and is ripe for exploitation. Plus, if all you ever use is a web UI, how are you supposed to troubleshoot or fix the machine when said web UI stops working?<p>If you're looking for pretty, single host, read-only monitoring dashboards though, checkout Netdata: <a href="https://www.netdata.cloud/" rel="nofollow">https://www.netdata.cloud/</a>
Cockpit is super cool. I've been using it for personal stuff for years now, especially since it's trivial to enable and use.<p>I even use it in production for monitoring small sites/apps. The graphs for CPU/Mem/Network/Disk are really great, and I can leave them open in a tab on my browser. I run one fairly popular blog that as a web machine and a db machine, and it's great for that.<p>That said I don't use it for "serious production" where I have more than a couple of machines simply because at that scale I prefer cattle to pets and I prefer aggregation.<p>I also find myself strongly preferring SSH and the CLI, likely because I'm very familiar with all that and have been doing that for decades.<p>I've never heard of security issues with Cockpit, but I do firewall it off from everyone but my own IP (or a few others if they are involved). It's pretty easy to do:<p><pre><code> # Get your IP address from home or work: curl -s 'https://api.ipify.org'
MY_IP=<ip>
firewall-cmd --zone-public --permanent --remove-service=cockpit
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent \
--add-rich-rule="rule family=\"ipv4\" source address=\"${MY_IP}\" port protocol=\"tcp\" port=\"9090\" accept"
firewall-cmd --reload
</code></pre>
Here's a gist of it: <a href="https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/0aabe5493ba02d1c9bb33fea2ec5e944" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/0aabe5493ba02d1c9bb33fea2...</a>
Shameless plug,I made a lightweight real time monitoring tools using websockets, it's open source: <a href="https://github.com/elestio/ws-monitoring/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/elestio/ws-monitoring/</a>
Contributions are welcome :)
I installed on one of my ubuntu servers and allowed port 9090, but when I try accessing it from chrome it gives me a warning page<p>"You cannot (IP) right now because the website sent scrambled credentials that Google Chrome cannot process."<p>Is this because I run a NGINX server from that box?
Is there a reason why successfully running software on a server is so much harder than running software on your phone?<p>I don't think it needs to be this way. Someone needs to figure out server software for consumers.<p>Just like PCs became more accessible, so should servers!<p>Edit:
Brainstorming here: specifically, I'd like a more accessible UI, automatic updates, sensible defaults on all apps, an easier way to get started and so on.
I'm searching for remote server file manager right now. I want to copy (and compare) large directories on same Linux server from my Macbook. Cannot find one so far.<p>Cockpit: "here is no graphical file manager, and we don't plan to add one." <a href="https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/11011" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/11011</a><p>CuberDuck: "FTP and SFTP do not support a copy operation."<p>Is there a way with GUI?
They're making great progress, it works and I have a friend who otherwise doesn't work in Linux happily use it on his homelab server.<p>For anyone experienced it's probably just a hinderance.
It comes on fedora servers by default. I’ve been using it for the last 3 years on my home servers. I’ve also installed it on armbian running on my *Pi devices.<p>It works just fine in my experience. I’ve configured mdraid with it for fun - and it worked. Ditched it in favour of Zfs which is not yet supported unfortunately.<p>I think it’s a good direction. It will become the default “GUI” for server maintenance I think.
I’ve actually been investigating cPanel alternatives as it’s become expensive and I think customers should have choice.<p>I find it interesting that I didn’t come across this one in all of my research I did last week or so, even though it’s backed by Redhat.<p>I actually think although we’re in a time of striving for serverless, there will always be a market for self hosting, be it niche.<p>Not everyone is building a huge SaaS platform but wants to run more than just a blog or website.<p>I don’t think this is the answer though. I think what these type of servers need is a standardised layer to interact with them, an API, something like how we have EPP for domains.<p>Because as we know, frontend will change so fast. The underlying hardware and OS changes too. Now seems like the right time to invent a new level of abstraction.<p>I’m not aware of anything that exists like this.
I've been using cockpit and cockpit-machine at home to manage a Windows VM I need for work stuff. It works pretty well except I wish there was better documentation for configuration; I haven't yet got the VM to recognize that I have a 4k monitor.
I live in the shell but for my home vms/boxes I love having this available. It’s particularly neat that you can integrate them all together and jump between different hosts. There are also extension packages to manage vms and Docker containers which is fun if I want to fire up a remote task.<p>Back in the day the closest thing to this was software called webmin.
I first ran into Cockpit when I put Fedora 33 Server Edition on an RPi. Needless to say, I was blown away by it and now keep it enabled on several servers I run.<p>I highly recommend it to anyone here, especially on something like a headless server where you don't want or can't have an X11 UI running.
It looks like this is written in Javascript with C backend components. I would never trust giving root to a web service written in C.<p>If anyone deploys this, make sure to bind only to localhost, and use an ssh tunnel to access it remotely, otherwise you're opening a massive attack surface.
there are so many tools and interfaces for similar things: prometheus, elastic search(ES), new relic, splunk .... I think the world is converging on 2 stacks: ES and prometheus. ES is hard to operate but can handle everything: metrics, tracing, logs. Prometheus promises to be easy to use and has good metrics and alerting. In our work, we chose ES. I don't think so far ease of use is possible and team has to get hands dirty for any good solution.
It is very nice but like other redhat stuff this somehow prevents browsers from saving passwords, or at least it did last I used it.<p>EDIT: Actually they seem to have fixed it now. Nifty.
Cockpit is a nice frontend for servers.<p>But for my homelab I run UnRAID (<a href="https://unraid.net/" rel="nofollow">https://unraid.net/</a>) which is an amazing software to rollout your own NAS and run services as Docker containers. Furthermore, the web UI is amazing to manage Docker containers and VMs.<p>And the community is awesome if you need any help.