How To Install and Use Cockpit Web Console in Centos 8

rifqiaz06 — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 17:33:55 +0000

What Is Cockpit?

The Cockpit is a Web Console with an easy to use web based interface that enables you to managing and monitoring on your server.
You can use the cockpit to monitor system logs and view system performance graphs.in addition, you can also configure settings directly in the web console or through the terminal.

Installing Cockpit in Centos 8

In this RHEL 8 installation, the Cockpit Web Console is not yet installed, therefore you must first install it using the following command (you can use yum or dnf, but this time I will install it using yum):

sudo yum install cockpit

type letter y then press Enter,and wait for the installation process to finish.

After the Cockpit Web Console has finished installing, run the command to start, enable and check the status of the cockpit service with the following few command lines:

 sudo systemctl start cockpit.socket
 sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

To check the status run the following command:

sudo systemctl status cockpit.socket
sudo ps auxf|grep cockpit

So If you are running a firewalld on the system, you need to open the cockpit port 9090 in the firewall.

Open the Cockpit service in Firewall Server by running the following few command lines:

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

Login to the Cockpit Web Console
open the Cockpit web console in your web browser at the following URL's:

Local:
https://localhost:9090

Server's hostname:
https://example.com:9090

Server's IP Address:
https://192.168.12.128:9090

To access the Cockpit Web Console in Red Hat 8, you can access using a Browser such as Firefox or Chrome with a url https://localhost:9090 or https://IP_ADDRESS_SERVER:9090 if you access it from the Client.
Since the url uses https, you'll see a security warning in your browser, but that's fine and can be continued.

After you see the login display like this, you can enter your Red Hat linux username and password

Click on Login
The Web Console will display the username on the right side of the title bar.but if you are logged in as the root user then the Privileged icon will be displayed to the left of the username.
but if you are logged in as a regular user(a user who does not have privileged) the privileged icon is not displayed.

Change Password

Privileged users and regular users can change passwords when logging in to the Web Console.click accounts on the navigation bar.click your account bar to see more.
if you are a non-privileged user, you will be limited to resetting passwords and managing public SSH keys. To reset your password, click Set Password.
Type your information in the Old Password, New Password, and Confirm New Password fields. Click Set to change the password.

Get to Know the Features of the Web Console Feature and its Uses

1. Overview
Click Overview on the navigation bar to view information about the system, such as its type of hardware, operating system, host name, and more.if you are logged in as a regular user, you will see all the information but you cannot change anything.here is the overview page image

2. Logs
Logs in the navigation bar provides access to analysis tools for the system logs. You can use the menus on the page to filter log messages based on a logging date range, severity level, or both.
The web console uses the current date and you can also specify any vulnerable date. Similarly, the Severity menu provides the option to view the severity conditions of a system such a Warning and above,Debug and above and so on.

3. Terminal
this Terminal serves to execute commands for managing and working with the system and for performing tasks that are not supported by other tools provided by the cockpit of the Web Console.
The following figure shows an example of a common command used to collect additional information. Listing the contents of the /var/log directory provides a reminder of log files that may have valuable information. The id command is a command to view like uid,gid,and member group. The ps au command gives a view of the processes running in the terminal and the user.

4. Services
this service system serves to start, enable, disable and stop services with graphical tools in the Web Console. to access on the first page of the Cockpit Web Console Click Services on the navigation bar. To manage the service, click System Services at the top of the service start page.
In the example below, select the chronyd.service line to open your service management page.
Click Stop, Restart, or Disallow running (mask) as appropriate to manage the service.In this view the service is already running.

5. Network and Firewall
To manage firewall rules and network interfaces, click Network on the navigation bar. the following is an example of how to collect information about network interfaces.
Click the desired Interface name to access the management page. In this example, the eth0 interface is selected.
The top part of the management page displays network traffic activity for the selected device. Scroll down to view configuration settings and management options.
To modify or add configuration options to an interface, click the highlighted links for the desired configuration. In this example, the IPv4 link shows a single IP address and netmask, 172.25.250.10/24 for the eth0 network interface. To add an additional IP address to the eth0 network interface, click the highlighted link.
Click + on the right side of the ** Manual** list selection to add an additional IP address. Enter an IP address and network mask in the appropriate fields.click Apply to activate the new settings.
The display automatically switches back to the interface's management page where you can confirm the new IP address.

Create New Account

if you are a privileged user, you can create a new user account in the Web Console.click Accounts on the navigation bar to view existing accounts.click Create New Account to open the account management page.
type the information for the new account, then click Create.
the view will automatically switch back to the account management page where you can confirm the new user account.

Conclusion

The Cockpit is an easy to use web console especially for those who are not able to use the CLI that allows you to perform administrative tasks on CentOs servers.