Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers • Hacker News Board

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#11

Post by roscas » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

NewJazz wrote: post #6

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

I think they dropped multi server managment because it was possible to add a few servers but I guess they drop that one out. You do can logon into a server right on the logon page. That is nice.

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#12

Post by rovr138 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

spogbiper wrote: post #7

rovr138 wrote: post #4

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 to set up webmin for the linux challenged admins so they could do basic tasks. it was nice because you could lock them to specific functions in certain modules and make it difficult for them to break things

yeah! I had some things through there early on when I was building sites. I had some custom scripts that could also be triggered by the users.

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#13

Post by rwmj » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

NewJazz wrote: post #6

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

Red Hat wants you to use Ansible for that.

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#14

Post by jonym » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

the opinion you didn't ask for:

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

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#15

Post by dist-epoch » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

jonym wrote: post #14

the opinion you didn't ask for: avoid admin UIs... at best they make you lazy, at worst a security nightmare

If you want people to self-host, this is a gateway to that.

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#16

Post by grigio » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

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

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#17

Post by poppafuze » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

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.

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#18

Post by Gabrys1 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

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

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#19

Post by krior » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

jonym wrote: post #14

the opinion you didn't ask for: avoid admin UIs... at best they make you lazy, at worst a security nightmare

I just want to check from my phone how my home server is doing. Maybe someone else gets a perverse pleasure out of catting /proc/meminfo but I don't understand the need to make things more complicated than necessary.

Re: Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

#20

Post by bravetraveler » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

NewJazz wrote: post #6

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

It's pretty single-server focused... but there is a 'Multi Host' mode. One instance can use SSH to look at N systems [independently]. This consolidates the Cockpit endpoints you might need to use/ports to open... but doesn't give much in the way of orchestration.

I believe when 'roscas' says this feature was dropped, they're talking about the requirement to enable 'AllowMultiHost'. As far as I know, this is still supported with some risk (according to the latest docs): https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/#secondary-auth