Today I installed and tested Fedora Server 23. This version of Fedora comes with cockpit, which are a web-interface for server monitoring.
I have mostly used CentOS up to now, but Fedora looks more interesting for the reasons I will mention below. To add my CentOS servers to the Cockpit monitoring, I need to install Cockpit on them as well.
Setting up Cockpit on CentOS 7
yum install git
git clone https://github.com/baude/sig-atomic-buildscripts
cd sig-atomic-buildscripts
cp virt7-testing.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
yum install cockpit
systemctl start cockpit.socketOpen https://yourIP:9090 in your web-browser and log in with the local user (Eg. root).
Source: http://linuxpitstop.com/install-cockpit-on-centos-7/
Remember to open port 9090 in firewall!
Why Fedora?
CentOS is a good and stable LTS OS, but it’s a bit slow for web development, as they are far behind on PHP/MySQL versions. Last stable PHP release is 5.6, and Centos is still running on 5.3. PHP versions is something I can handle on my own development, but the problem is when the third-party plugins and applications is not supported any more, like ADLDAP and PhpMyAdmin.
Running old applications and plugins is bad for security reasons, but you also don’t get new features.
Fedora is not meant for LTS (Long Term Support), but I need a webserver… Not a fancy server running critical system features. If I fuck up my webserver, I’m just minutes from setting up a new one, either from backup or scratch. The key is documentation 🙂
Cockpit
Project website: http://cockpit-project.org/
Cockpit is «new» and under heavy development, so it’s not the best/stable monitoring out there – but it’s basic, beautiful and satisfying most of the needs for monitoring.
Here are some screenshots of Cockpit, with one Fedora-server, one CentOS7 Webserver and one CentOS7 MySQL server. These are default local webservers, but as they are running in work-environment, I have masked the names for security reasons 🙂
