I can't imagine myself using this. One more port open, one more attack vector for those restless bots to scan for vulnerabilities, one more service I need to keep up-to-date. But I understand it would help Linux servers become more approachable, especially people that are switching away from PHP-based shared hosting to a full-featured VPS, don't have much knowledge about servers, and want something similar to cPanel or DirectAdmin.
Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
61–70 of 199 posts
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#62I'm an actual RHCE. This thread has to be some big Red Hatter click farm or something. The artificial positivity is striking. Is Red Hat threatening to pull funding for this project or something? Just weird. Cockpit is okay but it's basically Red Hat's equivalent to the Windows Server Manager tool, and I have no doubt it was directly inspired by Server Manager. It's development and improvement over the years has been…
> It's for people who want to point and click, can't do a bash for/while loop, don't understand pipe chaining commands, and don't like using vim.
I hate the mouse so much that I've got a script to move it off-screen (it follows my focus), and I usually live in my terminal. But trying Fedora on one of my Pis I tried cockpit since it was installed by default and I'm surprised how much I like it.
I think the lack of features is a good thing, there's not much bloat and it recommends extra packages I could like. While i love my terminal cockpit has been nice to get a quick glance. So far the only thing I'm missing is support for doas.
Every tool does not have to be able to do all the things.
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actually been running webmin on my raspberry pi 4 practically every since I got it, the night version of the authentic theme(one of the default) actually looks and feels relatively modern and is updated as well every now and then. My only nitpicks are the obsolete set of tools/panels available (it was the core reason why it took me so much to move from apache to nginx, because there's no nginx panel on the defau…
How's the footprint? Is it usable for investigating problems while the system is strained on resources?
It is not null, I'll tell ya. It's a bit of a tradeoff between cpu cycles and ability to do actual tasks.
You can't really investigate much a server with it unless you're investigating a machine in a cluster from a main broker because the panel can and will get sluggish to navigate(there's no good alternative to physical access or ssh in extreme cases), but hey, at least it won't drop you easily, because the frontend responds well to high latency.
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#642022, 81 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31439811 2021, 128 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197510 2018, 149 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612
That's kinda expected as the project matures and more people know about it.
I don’t post these as some kind of statement, but for people to check older discussions about a project or article.
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#65I'm an actual RHCE. This thread has to be some big Red Hatter click farm or something. The artificial positivity is striking. Is Red Hat threatening to pull funding for this project or something? Just weird. Cockpit is okay but it's basically Red Hat's equivalent to the Windows Server Manager tool, and I have no doubt it was directly inspired by Server Manager. It's development and improvement over the years has been…
> It's for people who want to point and click, can't do a bash for/while loop, don't understand pipe chaining commands, and don't like using vim
"Instagram filters are for people who don't know how to work with Photoshop layers, don't understand basic color blending operations, and who just want to swipe."
I mean, yes.
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#66Love it-- but since I'm not using systemd, it's a no-go. Would love to see it support more diverse systems, but last I checked it's pretty tightly coupled and I'm not sure who would have the bandwidth to adapt it.
Why you don't use systemd? Anything against it?
Thanks for asking! I've always used the "default" init system when trying a new distro, and while I enjoyed running systemd on Fedora, I've also enjoyed working with OpenRC on Gentoo and with Shepherd on GNU Guix. I've tinkered a lot with early boot, writing my own initrds, curating system services under each of these init's.
systemd is undeniably powerful, but I enjoy how broad the ecosystem is. Off the top of my head, I personally like having real logfiles under `/var/log`, which I've occasionally had to examine by mounting the disk on another machine after really mucking something up :p
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#67Love it-- but since I'm not using systemd, it's a no-go. Would love to see it support more diverse systems, but last I checked it's pretty tightly coupled and I'm not sure who would have the bandwidth to adapt it.
I wasn't quite satisfied with how Cockpit works, so I've recently been developing an alternative that aims to be customizable, modular and without daemons or other extra dependencies: https://github.com/kalaksi/lightkeeper
That looks awesome! I'll definitely be keeping tabs on this c:
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#68For others curious, https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit shows that it's written in several languages, with C at the #1 place, with JS and Python following. "src/cockpit" (main backend logic?) is Python.
Piggybacking off your comment I wonder how many other people really care about the tech stack used to create any product they are running on a server. What dependencies does it have? Do I need to be conscious of vulnerabilities in some logging library or Curl?
And I also find it really interesting to see whether a product is programmed using one clear stack or a mixture.
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#69I can't imagine myself using this. One more port open, one more attack vector for those restless bots to scan for vulnerabilities, one more service I need to keep up-to-date. But I understand it would help Linux servers become more approachable, especially people that are switching away from PHP-based shared hosting to a full-featured VPS, don't have much knowledge about servers, and want something similar to cPanel…
You don't have to open up a port, you can use a VPN or SSH tunnel (I don't know what the difference is) instead.
Re: Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers
#70Love it-- but since I'm not using systemd, it's a no-go. Would love to see it support more diverse systems, but last I checked it's pretty tightly coupled and I'm not sure who would have the bandwidth to adapt it.
Are we still fighting systemd? Why beyond being different? Proudly announcing "but I don't use systemd" seems less like a humblebrag and more like an old man "get off my lawn"
it's not a statement of pride, it's a statement of fact : this doesn't support systemd.
there are a lot of decisions that go into using older/obscure/specific software aside from 'pride', and simply wishing that some software supported other stuff is by no means 'fighting' anything.