Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers (github.com)

I've used this before in the early days of my Linux SysAdmin work, especially in the homelab.

It's pretty solid, but the limited amount of projects and lack of visibility into the CLI it uses on the backend hinder the ability to translate sysadmin work into tangible Linux skills, so I dumped it at home in favor of straight SSH sessions and some TUI stuff.

That said, if I gotta babysit Linux in an Enterprise without something like Centrify? Yeah, Cockpit is a solid, user-friendly abstraction layer, especially for WinFolks.

Cockpit is great! My NAS (built on a weird “N17” AMD 7840HS laptop processor put into a desktop “server”mITX motherboard by those wizards in China) stuck in a Jonsbo N2 with 5x4TB Samsung 870 evos in ZFS raidz1 is entirely managed by it

I keep meaning to look into making plugins for it, but honestly I’ve barely needed to. Cockpit, the 45drives ZFS plugin fork, and the web terminal have been more than enough for me

Interesting. This looks nice. Made me think of webmin which I used... years ago.

Went to look and webmin's changed. Pretty crazy.

I used Cockpit for years after I started having issues with my network card in FreeNAS. It's generally very good, though I never really figured out how to graphically swap out a hard disk in a RAID without trashing the data (which happened once).

I suspect that was user error on my end, so if you want a more-or-less no-nonsense way to manager a server, it's certainly worth checking out.

Does this work well with fleets? I remember looking at this early on it seemed fairly single-server focused.

I tried this out about 2 months ago when setting up a new server. I wanted something simpler and less resource heavy as webmin but it was just too simple. Adding questionable, half baked add-ons to get various functions to work just didn't give me the flexibility of webmin.

I installed the latest Fedora Server on my Framework Desktop and noticed that Cockpit was enabled automatically. Overall impression is that its pretty good for getting a quick overview of things and you can certainly do _some_ administration with it, but you run into its limitations pretty fast trying to get any serious work done with it.

It's probably great for those who are new to Linux and want that NAS-like admin web UI to get the basics set up as a stepping-stone before launching deep into the command line.

It is very nice. I hope more apps and options are added as it makes very simple to do some admin tasks. Want to manage services? No problem, it is very easy. Clear failed and disable? Easy. Want to see some disks and do admin operations on disks? It does. Want a simple system monitor? It tracks cpu, ram and more in a pretty interface. RHEL is dropping old interfaces like cluster management and starting to use Cockpit only. I just wish Cockpit would replace Hawk2 for cluster management as it is better then the old deprecated cluster manager web interface. But yes, install Cockpit or keep it installed ready to be use cause one day it saves the day...

the opinion you didn't ask for:

avoid admin UIs... at best they make you lazy, at worst a security nightmare

Very well done. For me cockpit is more than enough a mainstream proxmox

When it evolved a couple years ago to automatically set up the bridge for libvirt correctly, it had arrived. When that thing can set up pushbutton podman apps with decent net and persistence defaults it will be gold.

I tried using this to handle my 10-ish Docker containers, but I ended up using Portainer. Sure, not the same thing, but if someone (like me) thought Cockpit might be nice for managing a small Docker host, this didn't work for me

Ripe for a supply chain attack. What safeguards do they have to protect against one?

cockpit has a great virtualization interface, in my opinion this alone makes it a better "buy" than truenas for a home server.

I had a bad experience with it. We hired a contractor and he

1. insisted on a pre-war version of ubuntu

2. insisted on the cockpit. So you no longer can modify the NFS exports over ssh, you need to connect to this HTTP abomination. Very nice. Always wanted to open more ports on my servers

Question from a Cockpit PO: if you were to choose one feature to add to the project what that feature would be?

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN" "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
  <busconfig>
    <limit name="max_match_rules_per_connection">4096</limit>
  </busconfig>

What is the use case for this over standard command line tools like systemctl, journalctl, top, docker ps?

I used Webmin[0] back in the day, I wonder how more recent server web UIs like Cockpit stack up.

[0] https://webmin.com/

I don't mind UI, but I think it's a bad approach. Instead of hiding all those complexities of the server behind UI, I would like to see each part of the application teach me how to achieve the same result in CLI. That would be useful for people to teach themselves, because UI comes and goes but basic linux commands - will stay

Would be nice if the landing page had some graphical pictures for a graphical interface...

I have used cockpit and like it. It allows me to quickly see the entirety of my system.

But, it doesn't offer any way to review my incus containers.

So, I tried wolfstack, which was recently listed on HN.

It appears it only supports lxc. I'm surprised, isn't lxc and incus more or less 1:1 synonymous (unless you get into recent more complexities)?

I'm feeling like it is hard to find a simple GUI to just review a system and manage a bunch of containers and VMs.

I use this in my homelab. I really appreciate the systemd logging functionality in Cockpit.

It’s miles away from like Webmin, which I used god knows how long ago.

But does it work on a Gibson??

The very first thing I remove when I install Fedora. It's such a bloat that only takes up space and memory for most people.

I don‘t like the whole idea because it is less secure to have a web browser instead of a standard client. Think what an attacker could do if they take control of the server.