Fedora Server 36 Could Make It Easier To Manage NFS & Samba File Sharing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Server 36 Could Make It Easier To Manage NFS & Samba File Sharing

Red Hat with the Fedora community have been working for years now to make Cockpit very capable for a web-based interface for administering Linux servers. In addition to this year working on shifting their Anaconda installer to a web-based interface that makes use of Cockpit, from this web management portal they are wanting to make it easier to setup file sharing with NFS and Samba...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-36-Cockpit-Sharing

[ezst036]

Great idea.

Any time I can use a GUI instead of the command line to complete simple tasks -

-or -

Any time I can do the same task with 3 mouse clicks instead of 8 clicks - that's better for my life. And if its easier for the developers to maintain, I support that too.

(The only time CLI is superior is when you have to mass change many multiple computers on the network all at the same time with a script)

[MadeUpName]

I'm not sure why this wasn't' one of the first things that Cockpit was able to do. The web interface is aimed at the less technical and sharing files is one of the key tasks of servers. This is certainly more likely some thing the average schmo is going to do than futz with ABRT which has been part of Cockpit since forever.

[Eraserstp]

Would be nice to sort out btrfs support in the cockpit-storaged too.

[risho]

i've never used cockpit before but it blows my mind this wasnt like in the very first alpha release. unless this feature already exists but they are planning on just making it better?

[mattdm]

I'm not sure why this wasn't' one of the first things that Cockpit was able to do. The web interface is aimed at the less technical and sharing files is one of the key tasks of servers. This is certainly more likely some thing the average schmo is going to do than futz with ABRT which has been part of Cockpit since forever.

I can answer this! It's because there are so many different possible configurations for Samba (especially) but even for NFS. It gets complicated really, really fast — and, I think it basically went "overengineer, overengineer, oh wow this is too complicated, never mind". What we've got now is a very simple, somewhat opinionated sharing panel that basically doesn't even try to do more. Should we have had that sooner? Probably! But it takes someone interested in doing it. And in this case, that was the people at https://www.45drives.com/ — we've taken what they created for their product and adapted it to be a little more generic.

There's still some work that can be done. One particular thing is that the Samba sharing needs `include = registry` under `[global]` in `/etc/samba/smb.conf`. The Fedora samba team doesn't want that there by default. So, we should enhance the cockpit plugin to either be able to add that configuration itself (with an explanation of the implications), or to not use registry shares.

There is also plenty of room for UI improvement, and of course adding in some more of the possible advanced features.

[johncall]

This sounds like a great addition. I'm a huge fan of Cockpit! I'd like to see some more awareness of the "Navigator" module for Cockpit. It's primarily developed by the folks at 45Drives. It adds the ability to upload/download files via Cockpit.

https://github.com/45Drives/cockpit-navigator

Together these two modules have the potential to dramatically simplify the lives of sysadmins.

[mattdm]

johncall Packaging up the file sharing module wasn't terribly hard -- seems like adding the Navigator one wouldn't be either.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

This is pretty interesting. Is anyone here using Stratis? Once you have easy user / share management from Cockpit, if you also have a good storage platform (pooling, checksumming, etc.), for a lot of users that's the big hurdle to replace something like TrueNAS. Does Cockpit already support storage management with Stratis? The Linux container bit would seem even simpler (or at least more familiar to me) with something like Distrobox compared to TrueNAS Scale. Libvirt and Cockpit for VM management. This would just be for home use so leading edge packages are fine, as long as the storage backend is rock solid.

[johncall]

This is pretty interesting. Is anyone here using Stratis?

I played with Stratis a while ago when I was trying to add an SSD tier to a slower HDD pool. But I haven't seen Cockpit use stratis yet. What I do see is cockpit-storaged making it easy to partition disks, create LVM structures like PVs, VGA and LVs, and finally making it easy to setup encryption and format/resize filesystems.

Update: Oops, it seems there is some Stratis in Cockpit already. https://github.com/cockpit-project/c...10fe499b587914