Only recently the Cockpit project was launched, aiming at providing a web based management interface for various servers. It already leaves an interesting impression for simple management tasks – and the design is actually well done.
I just recently came across the only three month old Cockpit project. The mission statement is clear:
Cockpit is a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser.
The web page also states three aims: beginners friendly interface, multi server management – and that there should be no interference in mixed usage of web interface and shell. Especially the last point caught my attention: many other web based solutions introduce their own magic, thus making it sometimes tricky to co-administrate the system manually via the shell. The listed objectives also make clear that cockpit does not try to replace tools that go much deeper into the configuration of servers, like Webmin, which for example offers modules to configure Apache servers in a quite detailed manner. Cockpit tries to simply administrate the server, not the applications. I must admit that I would always do such a application configuration manually anyway…
More here…
