How to install the server management software Cockpit on Linux

How to install the server management software Cockpit on Linux
GuideCockpit is a free and open source server management software that allows us to easily manage our GNU/Linux servers through its nice Web Front-end interface. It is very lightweight and easy to use on Web interfaces.

Cockpit allows Linux System Administrators, System maintainers, and developers to easily manage their servers and execute simple tasks, such as managing storage, checking logs, starting or stopping services, and other tasks. Its report interface provides some excellent functions to easily switch between the terminal and Web interface. In addition, it not only makes it easy to manage a server, but more importantly, you only need one click to manage multiple servers connected to the network at the same time in one place.

In this blog post, we will learn how to install Cockpit and use it to manage the servers running the Fedora, CentOS, Arch Linux and RHEL release operating systems. Below are some great functions of Cockpit on our GNU/Linux servers:

1. It contains the systemd Service Manager.
2. There is a Journal log viewer for troubleshooting and log analysis.
3. Storage configurations, including LVM, are simpler than ever before.
4. You can use Cockpit for basic network configuration.
5. You can easily add and delete users and manage multiple servers.

1. Install Cockpit

First, we need to install Cockpit on our linux-based server. The cockpit installation package is available in most official software repositories of the release version. In this blog post, we will install Cockpit through their official software repositories in Fedora 22, CentOS 7, Arch Linux, and RHEL 7.

CentOS/RHEL

Cockpit is available in CentOS and RHEL official software libraries. You only need to use the yum manager to install Cockpit. You only need to run the following command with sudo/root permission to install it.

# yum install cockpit

Fedora 22/21

Like CentOS, Cockpit is also available in the official Fedora software library by default. We only need to use the dnf Software Package Manager to install Cockpit.

# dnf install cockpit

Arch Linux

Currently, no Cockpit is available in the official Arch Linux software library, but the Arch User Repository (AUR) Library is available. You only need to run the following yaourt command to install it.

# yaourt cockpit

2. Start and enable Cockpit

After Cockpit is successfully installed, start the Cockpit service using the service/daemon manager. In 2015, although some Linux distributions still run the SysVinit management daemon, most Linux distributions use Systemd, and Cockpit uses systemd to complete almost all functions from running daemon to service. Therefore, Cockpit can only be installed in the latest linux release that runs Systemd. To enable Cockpit and enable it to automatically start upon each system restart, run the following command on the terminal or console.

# systemctl start cockpit# systemctl enable cockpit.socketCreated symlink from /etc/systemd/system/sockets.target.wants/cockpit.socket to /usr/lib/systemd/system/cockpit.socket.

3. Allow access through the firewall

Start Cockpit and enable it to automatically start upon every system restart. Now we need to configure a firewall for it because the firewall program runs on our server, we need to allow it to access Cockpit from outside the server through some ports.

Firewalld

# firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit --permanent success # firewall-cmd --reload success

Iptables

# iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT# service iptables save

4. Access the Cockpit Web Interface

Below, we finally want to access the Cockpit Web interface through the web browser, according to the configuration, we just need to open the browser https: // ip-address: 9090 or https://server.domain.com: 9090. In this blog, we use a browser to open https: // 128.199.114.17: 9090, as shown in:

Access the Cockpit Web service through SSL

An SSL authentication warning will appear because we are using a self-signed authentication. We only need to ignore this warning and go to the logon page. In chrome/chromium, We need to click Show Advanced and then click Proceed to 128.199.114.17 (unsafe ).

Cockpit logon page

To enter the dashboard, enter the detailed logon information. Here, the user name and password are the same as the user name and password used to Log on to our linux server. When we enter the login information and click the Log In button, we will enter the Cockpit dashboard.

Here we can see all the menus and the visual results of CPU, disk, network, and storage usage.

Service

To manage Services, click Services in the menu on the right of the web page. Then, we can see that the service is divided into five categories: Target, system service, socket, timer, and path.

Docker container

We can even use Cockpit to manage docker containers. It is very simple to monitor and manage Docker containers with Cockpit. Because docker is not installed on our servers, We need to click Start Docker.

Cockpit will automatically install and run Docker on our server. After it is started, we will see the following, and then we can manage Docker images and containers as needed.

Journal Log Viewer

Cockpit has a Log Viewer that divides errors, warnings, and attention into different tabs. We also have an All tab, where we can see All the log information.

Network

In the network section, we can see two visualized transmission and receipt speed diagrams. We can see that there is a list of available NICs, as well as options for adding Bond, Bridge, and VLAN. To configure a nic, click the NIC name. Below, we can see the Journal log information of the network.

Storage

Now, you can use Cockpit to conveniently view the read/write speed of the hard disk. We can view the stored Journal logs for troubleshooting and repair. There is also a visualization map of used space in the page. We can even detach, format, or delete a partition of a hard disk. It also supports attack capabilities such as creating RAID devices and volume groups.

User Management

Through the Cockpit Web interface, we can easily create a new user. The account created here will be applied to the System user account. We can use it to change the password, specify the role, and delete the user account.

Real-time Terminal

Cockpit also has a great feature. Yes, we can execute commands and use the real-time terminal provided by the Cockpit interface to execute tasks, this allows us to switch between the Web interface and terminal as needed.

Summary

Cockpit is a free and open source software developed by Red Hat to make management servers easy and simple. It is very suitable for simple system management tasks and novice system administrators. It is still in the development stage and has no stable release, so it is not suitable for the production environment. It is developed for the latest default systora, CentOS, Arch Linux and RHEL systems installed with systemd. If you want to install Cockpit on Ubuntu, you can access it through PPA, but it has expired.


This article Reprinted from: http://www.linuxprobe.com/linux-install-cockpit-method/