Best Web Interfaces For Linux

tom here from lawrence systems now let's talk about putting a web interface on a linux server now this is already something i know there's going to be at least a few comments down below by some salty sysadmins who think that linux should never have a web interface but their interests are not aligned with mine i believe using a web interface can help people who are new to linux get started with it get started with managing it and also help people that are more casual users and don't plan to do this full-time for a living manage some of the internal servers in their home lab or just systems they may have that they are responsible for administering for this is a tool that makes it easier for them to use therefore i think it is a good thing now if you want to do a professional assisted bin job and do this for a living yeah you eventually wander your way into learning the command line which then brings you up to automation tools there's a little confusion when i've talked about this when i did my 45 drives review and the fact that they used the cockpit web interface and people asked well is this the same as ansible very different topic ansible is a great tool for doing automation i will leave links to videos i've done below and videos over at learnlinux.tv on that subject as well and talking about process automation this is not process automation or linux sysadmin automation this is all about just having a easier web interface to get some functions done and if you're unfamiliar with doing those functions from the command line or sometimes if there are functions you don't do very often these web interfaces can be really helpful the first one we're going to talk about is cockpit this is the one i reviewed when i was talking about the 45 drive server and just like it says here it is the easy to use integrated glanceable and open web-based interface for your servers it's actually a really nice system i do like cockpit it's rather basic it is available on fedora red hat core os atomic centos debbie and ubuntu clear linux arch linux and more pretty straightforward to install and actually for a lot of systems it'll be right in the repository and can just be quickly installed now let's talk about what it looks like the cockpit system over here here's the overview of it this is the one running on 45 drives and these are a couple specific extensions that i thought was cool that 45 drives added to this now the nice thing is because you can add more modules to cockpit it's relatively extensible for going in and going hey let's write a module for adding the disk manager or adding a motherboard manager a couple things that 45 drives did but this is all open source not only the cockpit project but the work being done by 45 drives and they added this cfs module if you are a linux admin and you've had to deal with lots of drives and lots of zfs well you're probably happy to have something like this and because this particular system has 30 drives in it set up with a raid z2 and several different pairings in here managing those drives from here as opposed to learning all the z pool commands which you may not use very often because you hopefully will never have to replace the drive because you're hoping they don't fail but if they do scrambling to remember commands or just going hey i can click the three dots and offline clear disk air or hit replace disk yeah it's a good reason frequently to use a web interface on top of this i went over here and loaded cockpit on this ubuntu install and to give you an idea that yes you can just throw the zfs module from 45 drives which i'll leave a link to their github and you just copy the module in there they have instructions and now i have it on this system completely unrelated to 45 drives this is a nice feature being able to go through add a couple modules as needed there's a handful of them out there on github for some specialized projects to extend the features that you have such as some virtual machine management account settings in here also services this can be really confusing for some people when you're first starting with linux and you're maybe used to if you came from the windows world the microsoft services list and it works very much the same in linux but doing it off in the command line listing out the services when you first start can be challenging going through here and go hey i just want to see system services running and let's filter for one like ssh all right this one's active and running and reload restart or stop it disallow or start and stop disable right here i can just slide a little bar these things can be very helpful because you may not have remembered the name of the command exactly to get this started this is where i think this is doing people a big favor for well when you don't do this very often this puts a really easy way to do it and yes it even supports doing software updates right through this but you're doing when you use cockpit everything the same as it is from the command line it's pushing those commands through the command line on the back end and cockpit itself does not have a web back-end configuration for all of this i bring that up like that because it's a little bit different than the way the other service we're going to talk about webmin works cockpit doesn't have its own deep configuration files it reads everything on the fly from the services that are running so if i start and stop a service or disable a service when it goes back and reads this there's not separate files it's reading in real time and writing in real time as you submit changes right to the backend system on there so you can actually easily go back and forth changing things from the command line or through the web interface and it's one in the same it's really nice the way that works now let's talk about webmin webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for unix using any modern web browser you can set up your accounts apache dns file sharing and much more now webm's been around for a long time i remember using it a long time ago when i did a lot of mail server administration one of the things that webmin has a lot of and by the way they can co-exist on the same system here's that same server that same ubuntu server also running webmin as it's running cockpit and webmin has a pretty long list of features in terms of modules it has and configuration support for things like apache for things like database management for syslog management it's really extensive what they've built into here now webbin does have its own configuration and this is where i will agree a little bit with some of the sysadmins when it writes out some of these configurations it may not write them exactly in the cleanest format that's a problem i haven't looked at because i haven't used in a long time but i know in the early days the way it created for example some of the apache virtual hosts which it's really nice that they go here and go to servers and there's our apache web servers we can go through and look at each module in there but i'll admit when it writes these out it has no problem reading standard ones but when it starts writing them out they can be a little bit confusing when you go back to the command line and look at it webmin itself also has lots of configuration options it's all written in perl and there will be some people that point out hasn't webman had a few flaws and bugs yes both cockpit and webman should never be publicly exposed over the internet they are a high-powered management control plane that should be treated as such that being said if they are on your general network and sometimes there has been flaws in the webmin project a few partly because of its age and how long it's been written and well when you write code long enough and write extensive modules like this there's bound to be flaws so yes this should be absolutely protected and treated as such because sometimes there are flaws but those flaws do require people's access to get to that that being said there's unfortunately if you check showdown probably way too many webmin systems exposed online that's not a good idea hopefully you're not among the people who have done that another thing that's nice is like samba file sharing now this is something that's in both the cockpit with the zfs manager from 45 drives and it has a module here that also offers things like windows unix and printing miscellaneous options when bind options file share options these are a lot of nice things because if you don't know all the commands to build a share this can be helpful to create a new share and then start going in all right check these boxes or if we look at the printer share that we have right here there's the share name or all printer share units print spool directory yes no options on there view connections i mean these are all things you can do from the command line but sometimes that can be a little bit confusing same with setting up users guests things like that now not just for printers of course but for the shares themselves that can all be done all within this module such as we can go right here create a new file share pick the share name the directory to share and being able to go through and say all right we want to share something like out of home hey there's our lts hit select hit create and well i forgot to play a very valid chair name but you get the idea that it's pretty easy to there we go now we've created an extra share name but the other nice thing about this is when you're going through some of the options like some of the networking options other options or may not be it may not be easy for people to remember all of the different options in here but putting a web interface on that can make it a little bit easier to get going and learn these and the nice thing is you can go look at the files and set up it creates so you can go through from the command line and read these and go okay that's how it created these options and i don't know i think it's a good back and forth for learning now one other module that is also a point of confusion many times in linux is learning how some of the firewall works both cockpit and webmin have options for this to allow you to go through and build some of the rules but always be careful because obviously one of the rules you need to make sure is in here is the access to either cockpit or webmin and whatever port they're running on webmin by default is on port 10 000 and cockpit is on port 9090 by default so as long as you don't lock yourself out from those it's kind of a good way to start learning and playing with the firewall and then maybe going back to command line learning more now i have a more in-depth video where i dive deeper into some of the features of webmin and like i said i'll leave links to the other videos like the 45 drives video where i talk a little bit about the way they use cockpit and modules and it's an overall review of the 45 drives platform but i know some people are kind of interested in you know why they're using a web interface and these are the web interfaces i wanted to talk about well the cockpit one that they're using or the webmin one because i think it's another system that is really helpful to get people started on there i'll leave links to the other videos that i mentioned below and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a short project head over to lawrences.com and click on the hire us button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 32,036

Keywords: lawrencesystems, Best Web Interfaces For Linux, webmin, webmin ubuntu server 20.04, webmin tutorial, webmin samba, cockpit project, cockpit project plugins, cockpit project raspberry pi, cockpit project alternative, cockpit project docker, cockpit project linux, cockpit project modules, cockpit project zfs

Id: pwrKyZD0L68

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021