Does it have an SSH terminal built right in the browser? Not clear from the screenshots or documentation.
If not you could also use Gate One[1].
Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
41–50 of 152 posts
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#42Why does it require that the server has password logins enabled? This seems contrary to every "secure your server" guide I've seen and opens your server up to the password guessing game. It seems like a cool product, but that's a huge non-starter. The target server will need to have password based authentication enabled in sshd. When this is setup for the first time, Cockpit will ensure that the user connected to pri…
Great value-add of reading HN comments!
I will wait until they get rid of this crazy requirement to consider using it.
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#43I tried it on my fedora 26 last year and my impression is that it has a far way to go and a lot of problems to resolve on the way. It's nowhere near a complete server administration product that will let you avoid the terminal. Perhaps for simple tasks but I fail to see the purpose.
Cockpit itself is trying to be a "platform of sorts for modules to hook into. oVirt, for example, will install a cockpit plugin during installation of a hypervisor node allowing you to manage the local host or global cluster maintenance state and see how many VM's are running on the system (I would argue this is of limited benefit since you could just login to the oVirt Admin portal to do the same thing, but hey).
So, yes, you're right - a lot of work still needs to be done, but Cockpit itself seems to be an adequate base, just need to add support for managing commonly needed services at least at a rudimentary level though (MySQL/PostgreSQL, Apache/Nginx/lighttpd, Postfix/Dovecot/exim/cyrus, etc).
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#44Does it have an SSH terminal built right in the browser? Not clear from the screenshots or documentation. If not you could also use Gate One[1]. [1] http://liftoffsoftware.com/Products/GateOne
Yes it does.
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#45Personally I'd much rather see a GUI that can help string together snippets of Terraform/CFN and Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt/whathaveyou. A visual IDE for infrastructure automation, if you will.
Yeah I also wish there was some good Config Management IDEs. I think someone like InteliJ might be able to make a decent one.
If you're doing Puppet then the plugin for IntelliJ works pretty well with Puppet code, including reference checks and all the good stuff you'd expect from a half-decent IDE.
Can't say anything about Chef or Salt, but with Ansible you get basically shit for help since the IDE just sees a YAML file and nothing more. This is partially the fault of Ansible though, to be honest, modules being standalone scripts that is cool - but they provide no standardized way to inspect their parameters and outputs beyond documentation.
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#46Personally I'd much rather see a GUI that can help string together snippets of Terraform/CFN and Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt/whathaveyou. A visual IDE for infrastructure automation, if you will.
So the idea is that you would choose your changes in the GUI, but instead of actually changing the target, it spits out the required code to do it for you in a repeatable way?
I would definitely find that useful for Terraform and Cloudformation. Searching for it, I see that AWS has a tool targeted at that: Cloudformation Designer.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-cloudformation-desi...
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#47Personally I'd much rather see a GUI that can help string together snippets of Terraform/CFN and Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt/whathaveyou. A visual IDE for infrastructure automation, if you will.
Yeah I also wish there was some good Config Management IDEs. I think someone like InteliJ might be able to make a decent one.
The terraform plugin for jetbrains products works really well. It auto completes all the resource types and knows what keys are valid under each one, so will suggest keys and highlight a resource as invalid if it’s missing a required key. I can’t imagine coding terraform plans without it.
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#48Why does it require that the server has password logins enabled? This seems contrary to every "secure your server" guide I've seen and opens your server up to the password guessing game. It seems like a cool product, but that's a huge non-starter. The target server will need to have password based authentication enabled in sshd. When this is setup for the first time, Cockpit will ensure that the user connected to pri…
I don't think it does. That quote is from the section explaining how to configure "Password" authentication. i.e. to use Password authentication, you must enable it on the target server.
It then goes on to list how to use Kerberos or Public Key methods.
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#49I just want to consolidate journald entries across multiple boxes with a nice wen based UI. Anyone used cockpit for this? Or another solution?
Re: Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser
#50Why does it require that the server has password logins enabled? This seems contrary to every "secure your server" guide I've seen and opens your server up to the password guessing game. It seems like a cool product, but that's a huge non-starter. The target server will need to have password based authentication enabled in sshd. When this is setup for the first time, Cockpit will ensure that the user connected to pri…
Probably because these "security guides" just repeat what others said without any real consideration?
In fact, using key-based authentication just shifts the weak point from one server to another, and, if implemented incorrectly (let's login without passwords to several servers - how convenient!), it's a security disaster. People need to think rather than follow recommendations blindly.