Changes/CockpitManagementConsole

Cockpit Management Console

Summary

The Fedora Server Product will ship the Cockpit Project as available by default, providing an approachable tool for system management.

Owner

• Name: Stephen Gallagher
• Email: sgallagh@fedoraproject.org
• Name: Marius Vollmer
• Name: Stef Walter
• Release notes owner: Petr Bokoc pbokoc at redhat dot com

• Product: Fedora Server
• Responsible WG: Fedora Server WG

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 21
• Last updated: 2014-07-04
• Tracker bug: #1091301

Detailed Description

Cockpit is a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser.

Easy to use

Cockpit is perfect for new sysadmins, allowing them to easily perform simple tasks such as storage administration, inspecting journals and starting and stopping services.

No interference

Jumping between the terminal and the web tool is no problem. A service started via Cockpit can be stopped via the terminal. Likewise, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal interface.

Multi-server

You can monitor and administer several servers at the same time.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora Server will benefit from having a simple and powerful graphical interface for managing systems. This will make Fedora Server more approachable to less-experienced administrators, as well as providing a set of new tools for veterans.

Some of the specific capabilities that Cockpit provides:

• Systemd service management
• Journal log viewer
• Storage setup, including LVM
• Basic Network configuration
• Add and Remove local users

Cockpit runs fine on headless servers, and makes it easy to access a server remotely. It aims to be useful along side other tools already in Fedora, and so will be useful to administrators, even if it doesn't yet solve every last need.

Scope

1. Inclusion of Cockpit as part of the default (not necessarily minimal) install set for Fedora Server

• Proposal owners:
  • Support for a modular architecture
  • Improved network management

• Other developers: N/A

• Release engineering: Inclusion of cockpit into comps.xml

• Policies and guidelines: N/A

• Special Requests: Cockpit would like to request an additional 2-4 weeks on the Fedora 21 schedule to ensure completion of the core functionality.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

As Fedora 21 will be the first version of Fedora Server, there will be no existing system from which to upgrade.

This Change should have no impact on users upgrading from Fedora 20 (with no Product identification).

How To Test

• Start the Cockpit service (or enable socket-activation)
• Connect to the Cockpit port with a web browser
• Flip switches, press buttons.

Until cockpit is installed by default in Fedora Server Rawhide:

   $ sudo yum install cockpit
   $ sudo systemctl enable cockpit.socket
   $ sudo systemctl start cockpit
   $ sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit
   -> http://localhost:1001

Try try out in Fedora 20:

   $ sudo yum install --enablerepo=updates-testing cockpit
   $ sudo systemctl enable cockpit.socket
   $ sudo systemctl start cockpit
   $ sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit
   -> http://localhost:1001

User Experience

Users will have access to a powerful web-based user interface for managing their system.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?)
  • The Cockpit project upstream would like to request an additional 2-4 weeks on the Fedora schedule to ensure completion of the core functionality.
  • If Cockpit is not feature complete, inclusion by default will be deferred to Fedora 22.
• Contingency deadline: Beta Freeze
• Blocks release? No
• Blocks product? Fedora Server (Very nice to have) .

Documentation

http://cockpit-project.org/