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Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

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

#101

Post by hosh »

stego-tech wrote: post #97
hosh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the technical assessment I have for hiring new platform engineers involves troubleshooting a service hosted in a headless Linux vm. Troubleshooting and fluency on the command line are among what I consider core skills. Being able to dig through abstraction layers is not just essential for when things go wrong, they are essential for building infrastructure, and really tells you whether an architecture is fit…

From a professional perspective, this is a solid question. And yeah, between the basic tool suite (top/cd/ls -l/df -H/grep/pipe '|'/ssh) and some common sysadmin/engie knowledge, I could get by with Linux just fine. "Just fine" doesn't cut it for troubleshooting sludgepipes and Kubernetes though, and my skills with Powershell finally gave me the confidence boost to take CLI/TUI seriously on Linux. And man, zero regre…

I know there are some brilliant engineers at Microsoft. There are some incredible engineering in some components.

I don’t know why Windows as a whole is such a piece of fractal shit.

Maybe it is shinnegans like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

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

#102

Post by threecheese »

cheema33 wrote: post #99

For the longest time I wanted to automated things with ansible. But it was a massive paint to plan/create new playbooks to manage servers and services. But now with Claude Code and other AI agents the ground has shifted. I have created a git repo that contains all my infra information minus credentials. Claude uses it to manage my infra using tools like terraform/tofu and Ansible. I also review the changes before the…

I’m on a similar trajectory. Claude is excellent at writing Dockerfiles, compose files, and operating docker. “Add a daily backup container to this compose file which writes to a new volume”, and it’s done.

I also experimented with skill-creator to generate a skill for “operating” my chezmoi in a read only way, and now when I use Claude in a certain directory it tells me what needs to be updated and which commands to issue. I can see why people are worried about human skill decline!

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

#103

Post by abrookewood »

xrd wrote: post #54

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 syste…

Curious if you have tried IncusOS or if you are just using Incus on linux? I'm doing the latter and have been considering moving to IncusOS.

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

#104

Post by SahAssar »

abrookewood wrote: post #103
xrd wrote: post #54

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 syste…

Curious if you have tried IncusOS or if you are just using Incus on linux? I'm doing the latter and have been considering moving to IncusOS.

> IncusOS or if you are just using Incus on linux

I get what you mean, but IncusOS is running linux.

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

#105

Post by GabeIsko »

This thing came by default on AlmaLinux, which I am evaluating for some HomeLab stuff. It's pretty neat! Definitely not a replacement for cotnainer management though - it is really more of a sysadmin portal where you can view services and open a terminal and such, but from a web console.

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

#107

Post by itomato »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #86
TimTheTinker wrote: post #32

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 looked at this and said "They've made Webmin again."

with all the potential vulnerabilities of 400 npm dependencies (I'm guessing. It's probably higher)

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

#108

Post by xrd »

the_real_cher wrote: post #96
xrd wrote: post #54

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 syste…

I use proxmox. I only use it for a home lab but it's pretty good and all I use are lxc containers.

Am I wrong that proxmox takes over the entire machine?

I like cockpit because I can use the machine as a regular Linux machine. It happens to have some containers and VMs running in a very ad hoc way. It wasn't the plan to use it for hosting originally but now it is. And cockpit can be configured to use other machines as well, right? So it makes it easy to grow into a quick way to review all the machines without me planning out nodes and centralized control.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I assumed proxmox was better if you planned on using a machine solely for the purpose of running virtualized machines.

LCD/incus seem like they would be a good fit for the way I used cockpit; because you can script them easily using CLI tools, so figured adding a cockpit plug-in would be easy. And you can migrate those containers and VMs to another host server easily.

This is all my homelab and I'm not being very intentional about the way I run things. I love to spin up a new server and then if things get overloaded (like I run out of ram on the host) I can easily move that server to another machine.

I have a bunch of host machines that are my kids gaming machines. They are basically unused during the day. ;)

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

#109

Post by stego-tech »

hosh wrote: post #101
stego-tech wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a professional perspective, this is a solid question. And yeah, between the basic tool suite (top/cd/ls -l/df -H/grep/pipe '|'/ssh) and some common sysadmin/engie knowledge, I could get by with Linux just fine. "Just fine" doesn't cut it for troubleshooting sludgepipes and Kubernetes though, and my skills with Powershell finally gave me the confidence boost to take CLI/TUI seriously on Linux. And man, zero regre…

I know there are some brilliant engineers at Microsoft. There are some incredible engineering in some components. I don’t know why Windows as a whole is such a piece of fractal shit. Maybe it is shinnegans like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

It's the management structure focused on short-term gains and promotion cycles, combined with a corporate culture focused very much on the same as management with the added twist of politicking, backstabbing, and undercutting other teams.

I've spent much of my life inside Microsoft's ecosystems. Not merely my career, but my technological life itself started with Win 3.11 on a parental laptop. I've spent so long in their orbit that I can generally infer what their latest thing does and how it works from an IT POV based on its product name alone, because I understand how Microsoft thinks from a marketing and engineering perspective.

As you say, they have some truly brilliant folks in their ranks. Those few diamonds are buried under mountains of garbage and slop from above, though. I mean, this is the company who pioneered full-fat PC handhelds 20 years before the Steam Deck, the smart watch a full decade before Apple, the home media ecosystem years before streaming apps dominated, smartphones before the iPhone, I can go on and on. The problem isn't the engineers so much as corporate mismanagement, but they somehow survive like a cockroach based on install size alone.

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