Cockpit – remote management tools

Cockpit is a lightweight remote management tool, that could be useful to manage a few servers.

User accounts, containers, network settings, etc can be managed through the WEB UI along with lots of other things.

To install cockpit use the following command:

sudo yum install cockpit -y

After installing service, enable and start it:

sudo systemctl enable cockpit.socket
sudo systemctl start cockpit.socket

Open the firewall with the following commands.

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=cockpit
firewall-cmd --reload

Now, restart your server with the following command:

 sudo reboot  

After starting the service and opening up the port for the service, you can open the WEB UI at https://ServerIP:9090 or https://server-domain-name.lt:9090

Now, type in root as the User name and the root password as the Password. Also, check Reuse my password for privileged tasks checkbox. Now, click on Log In.

These were some of the basic components which by default get installed with cockpit. However, if for example, you want to manage your disks as well through the UI you will have to install the relevant cockpit module.

sudo yum install cockpit-storaged -y

Furthermore, if you want to manage more than one server you will need to install an additional module called cockpit-dashboard.

sudo yum install -y cockpit-dashboard

As you can see cockpit can be a really useful tool when you have only a handful of servers to manage. Hope this short article gave a bit of an overview and some starting ideas around cockpit.