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:
- Product: Fedora Server
- Responsible WG: Fedora Server WG
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 21
- Last updated: 2014-04-01
- Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
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
- 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.
(To be filled out in more detail later)
User Experience
Users will have access to a powerful web-based user interface for managing their system.
Dependencies
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) .