I feel like I've wasted years, by not using Cockpit.

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MrBread0451@reddit

It's cool but like, why is it a web interface?

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k3rrshaw@reddit

“Opensuse is set to sunset Yast.” Wait, what?

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

Yup, 30 years old bout to be gone. But it will still be in the default repos so ppl can still install it. But fresh installs with use cockpit by default.

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Anonymo@reddit

Aren't they using that weirdly spelled Merlin so for now?

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I know RedHat is all in on Cockpit, but RedHat before RHEL had this wonderful tool called LinuxConf. This is what I miss most in modern Linux, is the lack of a true system administration tool. YaST was the closest one to hang around. But back in the day we had LinuxConf on RedHat, Adminmenu on Libranet, the Mandrake Control Center on Mandrake, Vasm on Vector Linux, and I know there are more I'm forgetting because I've used so many. Lindows had a customized KDE Control Center, FedoraCore (not taking Fedora, we're talking the early days when it was FedoraCore) and Ubuntu both shipped around the time GNOME 2 was out and there was a rich array of GTK2-based admin tools (not part of GNOME, just built with GTK) available, most of which have been orphaned by the end of GNOME 2. Admin tools are a _lot_ of work, but I'd sure love to see a new one that really works well with good coverage.

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Synthetic451@reddit

Cockpit is a neat tool, but I always find that it is *just* missing one or two things that always make me have to rely on other tools instead. Every single category that Cockpit covers has this issue and I always without fail have to log in via a terminal instead and do things manually. Cockpit becomes this nice read-only dashboard for me where I can see overall status, but if I ever need to administer anything I always have to exit out. * Metrics are nice, but if I see a CPU or Disk spike, it doesn't show me what program is actually causing it. It just shows the nearby systemd logs at the time of the measurement * Firewalld config doesn't let me modify runtime rules. It always has to modify permanent rules and reload, which plays hell with the rules that podman creates. I can't temporarily open up ports without creating a new service, and I can't delete the new services after I have created them. * Podman containers section has no way to configure networks. * Virtual machines doesn't let me add / remove hardware devices beyond basic disk and network configuration. I get that covering all usecases can be a big task, but the features that Cockpit is missing means that I can never truly rely on it for any real system administration.

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TonyTone_090@reddit

🔥🔥🔥

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Zer0CoolXI@reddit

Essentially my exact experience with Cockpit…I have tried it on several occasions and every time it’s been too limited to be worth using. I haven’t tried it recently, back when I last tried it, it wasn’t able to handle RAID or maybe it was ZFS…in any case dealing with an array of storage was a pain in the butt requiring me to go CLI anyway. I recall it having some KVM VM capabilities but very limited as well. I think the concept of it is better than the reality

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Synthetic451@reddit

It can't handle ZFS. I think there is a 3rd-party plugin by 45drives but last I checked it was unmaintained. Yes, it does have libvirt integration for VMs and you are able to view the desktop from within the web interface, which is super neat, but yeah the actual VM config is limited. There's nothing technical preventing Cockpit from becoming an amazing tool given more development. It just seems like no one's doing the work unfortunately. These missing features honestly feel like the last 5-10%. It's so close!

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uberbewb@reddit

It surprises me how little has been accomplished with cockpit with how long it has been around to be honest.

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No_Rhubarb_7222@reddit

Cockpit is a Red Hat sponsored project and is mainly (almost entirely) written by a small team of Red Hat engineers, which is why it works well for Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL, but is not always as smooth on other distros. e.g. other distros don’t significantly contribute so that it operates their stuff or makes their choices well. I 100% agree with your assessment of 3rd party. Cockpit is modular. Could you imagine Postgres or MariaDB adding in a cockpit module that has controls for working with their DB? I think that would be killer. Cockpit has been around for what, 8-9 years? When I first used it in 2019 it was functional, but sparse. Since then they’ve added the cockpit-machines plugin (which is quite nice now), podman plugin, imagebuilder plugin, and have added things like the machine performance overview (with log highlights). Pretty much everything else has gotten way better since 2019, I’m thinking specifically of package management and storage.

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uberbewb@reddit

It is a great foundation for sure, definitely never had any issues using it. Seeing how much unraid is basically just a gui and got tons of support from a community. I suppose maybe it’s because RHEL backs it that it didn’t quite get the 3rd party boom as of yet. Idk just seems odd

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nply@reddit

>modify permanent rules and reload, which plays hell with the rules that podman creates. I think there's a systemd service that comes with netawark, which automatically takes care of that.

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Synthetic451@reddit

Hmm, is that a Redhat / Fedora only thing? I am not seeing that service via systemctl nor is it shipped with the netavark package, and I am on version 1.15

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lelddit97@reddit

cockpit isnt a silver bullet but its a helpful enough solution that basically comes out-of-the-box with nearly zero effort to set up.

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archontwo@reddit

The one gotcha that tripped me up was when I enabled podman interface and as root was unable to stop another users containers that were out of control. That left a bad taste in my mouth as it was a production server for a client and I had to explain why suddenly I revoked access to the gui they were using. Not sure if that is still an issue but other than that cockpit was very nice to use.

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Synthetic451@reddit

Was it because he was running it in rootless mode and you were trying to manage it as root? Podman seems to have entirely different sets of images, volumes, networks, containers, etc. for root and non-root, which is confusing at first but quite useful once you experience it.

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archontwo@reddit

Something like that. irritating as it had been docker, I could have killed it instantly

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

On the podman containers. I would assume it would be more practical to handle everything through quadlets (just started learning this stuff). Hey, I'm Planner and I'm posting this question in the Podman form. But since I got somebody who knows Podman here. I was using quadlets to run rust desk. There are two containers. In total, there are five ports that needed to be open. At first I attempted to link both of those containers using a single pod and had the pod open all five ports. But when I ran it, I could only ever get two ports to open. At least those were the only two ports that were showing us active. But if I eliminate the pod and I just open up the ports in the containers themselves, everything runs just fine. Do you have any guidance?

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scorc1@reddit

Single 'app' with multiple containers should be a single quadlet. I would reference the docker compose to correctly formulate the quadlet (not an exact 1 for 1).

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MarzipanEven7336@reddit

So it’s a Pod.

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dst1980@reddit

Another nice management interface is Webmin. I have used it for years, and it keeps exposing new (to me) things it can do.

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Redditperegrino@reddit

It works pretty good on Debian 12. My usecase is minimal, however. I really use it for cockpit-machines and cockpit-podman. My favorite feature is the ability to make js/react modules.

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_AACO@reddit

Might give it another try, Las time I used it (5 years ago maybe more) it was very barebones.

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fearless-fossa@reddit

Cockpit still has a few issues, but the most deal-breaking thing for me is the lack of ZFS support. Yes, there's poolsman, but I will not pay for early access software, especially not if I'm going to use it for my private stuff primarily. Also, $300/a for being able to make 10 tickets is fucking ridiculous.

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No_Rhubarb_7222@reddit

This has very little to do with cockpit and a whole lot to do with the lack of open source-y ZFS. In theory, someone in the ZFS et. al. community could make a cockpit plugin for it or add it onto the existing storage UI, but since ZFS is not open source, I think it'd be a challenge to get that accepted into the upstream.

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Fit_Smoke8080@reddit

Don't like that they tried to replace virt-manager with this. Cockpit has use cases but isn't cut for managing local VMs IMO. Why in the world would i want to open a whole web browser and multiple VMs at the same time to hog more resources?

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

>Why in the world would i want to open a whole web browser and multiple VMs at the same time to hog more resources? I don't understand what you mean. Surely the web interface is just interacting with the underlying command line tools. So, Its just a fancy portal to access the command line.... right?

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Fit_Smoke8080@reddit

Cause an entire web stack with process isolation wastes much more resources for rendering the same UI control for the same CLI frontend than a barebones GTK UI. If i'm managing a cluster of VMs somewhere else this is irrelevant, but if i'm running VMs on a single local device is a waste of resources.

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hadrabap@reddit

My RHEL 8 clone comes with it as well. The only useful thing for me is the systemd units summary. The rest is useless (a VM summary, podman containers that don't see my services account dedicated to podman, an OS Builder that fails to start...). I don't know what to take from it. I need to script everything to be automated anyway. Running a podman container? Why? Does it allow me to define a quadlet? What about custom SELinux rules for said container? I must admit: I'm completely lost here.

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maltazar1@reddit

for some reason when I used it on my fedora server since it comes by default some commands would just straight up not work things like dracut, for example. but then I sshd into the machine and it worked fine. at least in my case I don't need to manage much, so I dropped it from my install

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SheriffBartholomew@reddit

You guys do system maintenance on your machines?

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spyingwind@reddit

Just setup [Unattended Upgrades](https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades) and never worry about silly things like system maintenance! /s

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SheriffBartholomew@reddit

Ooh, shiny! That actually looks a lot better than my practice of updating when I feel like it, which usually means every four months or so. Can you tell this thing not to proceed with updates that require user intervention, or will it just break your OS?

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spyingwind@reddit

It defaults to just security updates, but you can configure it to also install any update, specific packages, or exclude packages. Like my gitlab server I exclude the gitlab-ce package as some upgrades need special attention.

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SheriffBartholomew@reddit

Pretty cool. I'm going to look into that when I'm done migrating my system to the btrfs file system this week.

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natermer@reddit

I use it mainly for managing virtual machines. Libvirt has a reasonable terraform support. So I'll deploy VMs using that since it supports everything needed for cloudinit and ignition. https://registry.terraform.io/providers/dmacvicar/libvirt/latest/docs/resources/coreos_ignition Which is nice for deploying a lot of cloud images. It isn't perfect as sometimes I need to manually clean up stuff, but for repeated deployments and whatnot it works pretty well. It is a good alternative to things like proxmox or vmware for small scale deployments. Probably up to 5 or 10 machines or so. It doesn't do live migrations (you can do it 'manually' using cli tools if you want), but I can't remember the last time that feature was useful to me.

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Brufar_308@reddit

Reminds me of the early days when I used to use webmin. Webmin did practically everything, or at least seemed like it at the time.

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LovelyWhether@reddit

i so agree! very much like a more modern, less functional webmin!

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MSXzigerzh0@reddit

I do not like Cockpit because it doesn't support audio within the VM.

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ipaqmaster@reddit

That sounds entirely outside the scope of it.

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MSXzigerzh0@reddit

Ok thanks, now I'm going to stop hoping they add some day

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ipaqmaster@reddit

I've only been exposed to it on maybe one or two hosts ever. I've never found myself in a situation where I would use it over a ssh into a target host with a terminal.

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Ok_Instruction_3789@reddit

Its surprisingly decent. Been using it for a while

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Novapixel1010@reddit

I have not used it in a long time. Maybe I should add it to my tech guide.

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