How to secure your Linux Server with Cockpit Web Interface?

Securing a Linux server is essential to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data it stores and processes. There are many ways to secure a Linux server, and one of them is using the "Cockpit web interface". Cockpit is a web-based interface that allows us to manage and monitor your Linux server remotely through a web browser. It provides a simple and user-friendly web interface (GUI) to perform various tasks such as starting and stopping services, configuring firewall rules, and managing users / groups.

In this article, we will discuss how to secure your Linux server using the Cockpit web interface. We will cover some of the key features of Cockpit and how to use them to secure your server.

How to install & run Cockpit in Linux?

In order to install cockpit on our Linux system. We should install these packages: cockpit cockpit-machines. Here are some commands used to install in mostly used distros:

Debian/Ubuntu sudo apt-get install cockpit cockpit-machines
Arch sudo pacman -S cockpit cockpit-machines
CentOS/Fedora sudo yum install cockpit cockpit-machines
RHEL8 sudo dnf install cockpit cockpit-machines
OpenSUSE sudo zypper in cockpit

Make sure that cockpit service is up and running. (You can check it using the service or systemctl commands.)

$ sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

You can access Cockpit in browser at the following URL (where SERVERIP is the IP of your Linux server or localhost):

https://SERVERIP:9090/

More detailed installation instruction can be found here.

How to use Cockpit web interface in Linux?

Cock is a very powerful tool with various functionaliy. It is necessary to explore its dashboard and manage your Linux server.

First, you need to login to the Cockpit as one of the existing users. The dashboad of root user will look similar to this image.

Once you've successfully have access to the Cockpit web interface dashboard. You can perform all sort of tasks to manage your Linux server easily.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed how to secure your Linux server using the Cockpit web interface. We covered some of the key features of Cockpit tool including configuring firewall rules, managing users and groups, monitoring system logs, and enabling automatic updates. By using these features, you can improve the security of your server and protect it from potential threats.