The Cockpit Management Console In Fedora 21 Makes Linux Administration Easy

One of Red Hat's newest software projects was the Cockpit Management Console that was announced near the beginning of the year. With the Fedora 21 Server release due out tomorrow, Cockpit is shipped by default and is a great new service for easy, web-based administration of servers.

While Canonical has Ubuntu Landscape as an enterprise systems management tool, which is not free after a thirty-day period, Cockpit is fully open-source and free. There's also cPanel and other Linux web-based system administration panels. Cockpit meanwhile is shipping by default in Fedora 21 Server and in time will surely end up in Red Hat Enterprise Linux in due course. Cockpit allows for easy system administration, managing multiple servers from a single point, and all of this is done quite elegantly.

I decided to try out the latest package of Cockpit on Sunday night using the near-final version of Fedora 21 Server. Overall I was impressed by Cockpit and should help out new Linux administrations or those wishing for a web-based interface for monitoring and maintaining a Fedora/RedHat server.

Installing Cockpit was easy via "yum install cockpit" and then after that it was just a matter of enabling the Cockpit systemd service and allowing the HTTPS process to get past the firewall. Users sign into Cockpit with their standard system usernames/passwords.

The main page of Cockpit when viewing at an individual server/system shows the CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network traffic. You can also upload a photo of your server if you wish.

The basic hardware, BIOS, OS, host name, and domain information is shown.

Cockpit allows viewing all of the system services via systemd.