What is Reddit's opinion of Cockpit Project?

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While they say it is not maintained that much, it is still updated.

However, the newer, better alternative seems to be cockpit.

This is a pretty broad topic, and you're talking about covering several bases here:

• Service monitoring. This involves making sure a port is listening, process is running, or some similar binary state (on/off.) There are several projects that do this that you could build off of (sensu, nagios, icinga, etc.) and others that wrap other technologies into a bigger package (Observium, Zenoss, etc.)
• Metric aggregation. The gold standard here is graphite or ganglia - I like ganglia because it's an almost effortless setup (multicast cluster discovery) though there are lots of newcomers here (the hot new thing lately is new timeseries databases like InfluxDB that can be fronted with something like grafana to visualize metrics.) Again, some projects wrap this functionality into a larger package (nagios to some extent, Zenoss, anything that draws rrdtool graphs)
• Remote administration (your bonus #2.) Traditionally I really dislike these solutions because they add more exposed surface to hosts you're running and abstract away problems, but if you're looking for something then maybe webmin, cpanel, or something equivalent, but these solutions are heavy and are honestly probably overkill. I've been reading up on the Cockpit Project lately, and it's an interesting idea that seems promising and seems to address a few of these use cases you've enumerated.

With all that being said, I think you'd be served best by the simplest solutions out there (always a fan of simplicity for fewer parts breaking, ease of extention, etc.) With that in mind, I'd suggest ganglia for your metrics (CPU, network, disk I/O, etc.), monit, nagios, or sensu for service monitoring, and if you really want remote admin, Ajenti if you're looking for something semi-established, and maybe play with cockpit if you're feeling adventurous (I have zero experience with it, but... it just looks cool.)

Maybe to start with, check out Cockpit Project (http://cockpit-project.org/). If you aren't familiar, it is a server dashboard that does a little bit with VM management. Might be enough to keep you on CentOS.

As for OMV in Proxmox, I don't see what you gain (maybe I have a bad imagination). Proxmox will handle the storage well enough. And if you convert some of your VM and services into LXC containers, you'll keep more of your management in the Proxmox GUI.

You mean, things like per service monitoring, easy per service throttling and organized logs are usable to desktop and not enterprise server? My mileage is completely different, ever since moving on RHEL/Centos7 our whole infrastructure became really simple and most importantly predictable

Even using old /etc/init.d service file with all old commands is still ends up beneficial when used in systemd. At the same time you use "chkconfig myservice on" systemd auto generates unit file which can be fine tuned and get all the benefits of systemd

In your place I would really check http://cockpit-project.org/ just to see what everything can someone do by default to get the feeling how maintainable services are compared to anything else

It supposedly has the ability to aggregate stats from other sources, but that feature doesn't seem to be documented (that I can find).

Cockpit is another one to look at. You can add multiple remote servers to the 'dashboard'. I have found it to be lacking, but it will spit out the basics at the very least.

I'd recommend CentOS 7. CentOS is a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat is generally very responsive on security updates, which CentOS gets too.

CentOS releases have a long lifecycle (10 years), and there's a nice web-based administration tool available called Cockpit which is available for CentOS, Fedora Server, and Arch.

It can be installed easily by doing "yum install cockpit" (as root, of course) after you have CentOS 7 set up. If you install the EPEL repository ("yum install epel-release"), then you can install owncloud from the repositories too.

You can see what's available in EPEL for CentOS 7 here.

Consider cockpit: http://cockpit-project.org/

Though the maintainer (ex-Canonical) now works at Red Hat, they're committed to bringing the latest to released versions of Ubuntu. Not sure about mailserver integration though.

If they are Centos/RHEL/Ubuntu/Debian servers, you may be able to use Cockpit

Link to homepage: http://cockpit-project.org/
An introduction with more screenshots: http://www.tecmint.com/cockpit-monitor-multiple-linux-servers-via-web-browser/

You just use a browser to connect and manage the servers.

You can read logs, add users, monitor resource usage, start and stop services or containers, or reboot the servers etc.

Very nice gui, really lightweight framework, so you don't need to install a lot weird dependencies in order to make it work.

There is a inbuilt terminal too, so no need to ssh in again if you need to do some CLI work.

You can admin multiple servers at the same time, though no personal experience with that. I just checked it out, found it very slick but not better than the CLI.

I initially thought this too. I was vaguely familiar with it from Project Atomic and FreeIPA. When I read the article I was thinking to myself that this would be useful and more widely adoptable as a dashboard for multiple servers. It looks like it either can do this, or it is planned on the road map. From the Cockpit Project Page:

>Multi-server >You can monitor and administer several servers at the same time. >Just add it easily and your server will look after its buddies.

From the docs it looks like it works over simple SSH.

Yes, "Cockpit" is one such program:
http://cockpit-project.org/ Web based service administration; admin multiple server at once, systemd integration so you get instant log message feedback from starting or stopping services. You also get storagecontrol, networking administration, Docker container management etc. It utilizes Dbus to control and execute a lot of its functionality so it is really small and lightweight program.

Proxmox is pleasant to use. Unless you really want to tear your CentOS install down though, you could always try a different management interface first. Haven't tried either myself, but there is Kimchi: https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi and Cockpit: http://cockpit-project.org/

There are GUIs for md (linux raid) / lvm (linux volume manager) / luks (encryption) / btrfs features like subvolumes. For example, blivet-gui, which is a normal desktop app, and which you must provide with root credentials if you want to make any change.

There are also web GUIs, like cockpit, where you can also make a lot of damage, including in disk management; but it is basically "ssh over https, with a GUI". You still have to log-in, and it will run anything with the credentials you provided.

Thanks for the tip! I just found the PPA and the website for the project. Unfortunately, upon installation, I realized that it could only be started via Systemd, which 14.04 lacks. So I guess I'll just get Cockpit when Ubuntu 16.04 rolls around! Thanks again!

You might want to checkout cockpit it seems distribution agnostic. There's some more pictures of it here. Hopefully this helps.

Personally I avoid any GUI management as it's easiest for me to deploy and manage large fleets with configuration management tools (git + Ansible playbooks or puppet manifests).

I'd rather suggest using Cockpit. It's bundled by default with Fedora server edition, and RHEL7. Makes for a very nice server UI, without doing a lot of the crazy and insecure fork& exec that old style frontends did.

Can't PRTG look at the incoming requests for our web servers or if the service is up or down? Or the individual size of each databases? Because the usual users won't be doing exploration stuff as much as we do on the servers, they might have a hard time understanding things without a simple UI.

I suppose I can look into each of our servers from time to time but that will take a lot of time. Mainly, I use cockpit to check services, network, logs, etc.

- Running Cockpit

If you already have Cockpit on your server, point your web browser to: https://ip-address-of-machine:9090

Use your system user account and password to log in. See the guide for more info.

If you want to have an interface for your Ubuntu Server box there are two options.For a more traditional experience I'd install a lightweight desktop like xfce via the xubuntu-desktop package (or you can pick and choose individual xfce components) and use X2Go. Performance is amazing, and this way you can just remote in from your main PC without having to switch inputs.

If you don't need a full desktop but just want something to administer things via the web, check out the Cockpit project. It was built with Fedora in mind, but should run quite well on anything that uses systemd (which Ubuntu does).

have you generated keys for cockpit?

http://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/https.html

https://www.vultr.com/docs/generate-ecc-certificate-on-ubuntu-14-04

I'm not familiar with cockpit but this would make sense to me that it's the problem.

Fedora Server is a good choice here. We ship it with Cockpit, a modern web UI which integrates cleanly with the system (not like old scary webmin stuff) and is basically designed to make life easy for people coming to Linux servers from the Windows world.

Yeah cockpit is available on a few distros. It is even available on RHEL 7 / CentOS 7.

Since cockpit has its own pam module, you can setup two-factor auth as well.

Cockpit is pretty awesome.

> I think the main problem OP is having is that Windows admins are a lot more replaceable than Linux admins, and management knows that.

As a Linux guy, I will agree to that (for now). However, that is why projects like Cockpit will make managing Linux systems so much simpler. A Cockpit web interface to a Kubernetes and Docker environment would make deploying and managing applications even easier on Linux than on Windows.

With that greater ease of use, I can see a more steady rise of of jr. linux admins who can manage the environment.

> I don't expect this to change at all in the brief future.

Trust me, Red Hat has heard this loud and clear. The fact that the learning curve of Linux is high is the biggest impediment to further growth. However, Red Hat is putting millions of dollars of development into the Cockpit project. The end goal is to offer something easy to use like Windows System Manager. Once this becomes more common place, I can really see jr. linux positions become more prevalent.

NFS is not what you want. NFS has several downsides. It trusts its clients, it only works with Unix-like OSes well. And encryption is not very well.

Samba on the other side does not necessarily trusts its clients, supports encryption and is supported on many platforms.

Samba is THE cross platform file sharing protocol. Apple even axed its own AFS and made Samba the default some version ago.

NFS is in a sorry state, it has and had some serious bugs that weren't addressed for a really long time.

Some terminology:

• Samba is the FOSS project and program
• smb is the server message block protocol
• cifs is the fancy new name only used by Windows. But it is also smb.

WebUI:

• Cockpit (needs systemd so not for 14.04)
• Ajenti
• NOT Webmin (horrible UI and not secure, only expose it to localhost if you really need it!)

Always linux software RAID. Hardware RAID controllers have to many disadvantages for a negligible speed advantage, at least for home servers.

Thank you for your input. I will check both and see how I like them. In the meantime I came across Cockpit and FAN http://cockpit-project.org Cockpit's UI looks very nice and promising. It's available only for RedHat CentOS, Fedora and Arch. I managed to install it on a CentOS 7 vm but I was unable to add another server, I adding a CentOS 6 machine, but no success. I guess the project is still in development. I have yet to try FAN, which is a Nagios distro http://www.fullyautomatednagios.org/

For systemd-based distros Cockpit is pretty nice. It's more of a systems management application so it doesn't do alerting or anything like that but it does give you some basic high level administration (including performance graphs and such).