Web Console is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 web-based interface designed for managing and monitoring your local system, as well as Linux servers located in your network environment.
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Managing services
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Managing user accounts
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Managing and monitoring system services
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Configuring network interfaces and firewall
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Reviewing system logs
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Managing virtual machines
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Creating diagnostic reports
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Setting kernel dump configuration
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Configuring SELinux
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Updating software
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Managing system subscriptions
The following exercises will walk you through installing and configuring Web Console on RHEL 8.
Since we already have web-console installed and active on workstation.example.com, we have the option to manage multiple additional hosts via this single portal. Let’s install a few packages to enable the web-console dashboard on workstation.example.com. These steps needs to be performed as root.
yum install -y cockpit-dashboard
Once the packages are installed, you will need to restart the cockpit services to enable the new functionality.
systemctl restart cockpit
This will likely force you to sign-on to the web console again.
Click the icon on the left that looks like a speedometer.
Now click on the + icon to add node2.example.com to the list of servers we can manage with this web-console.
Now click on node2.example.com in the server list to start with this lab.
For your convenience, the webconsole has already been installed and configured on node2.example.com. The steps are pretty simple and outlined below. Remember this provided as reference only as they were executed during the ansible play of prep-rhel8-workshop.
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Native command(s) to install and enable firewalld yum install -y cockpit systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit --permanent firewall-cmd --reload |
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If you are usng the web-console on workstation.example with your local browser, you do not need to access the GUI console. |
On host workstation.example.com, use the console GUI to start a web browser.
Then browse to URL: https://node2.example.com:9090
Login userID: root Password: <ROOT-PASSWD>
Here is a simple dashboard where you can monitor current system activities:
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CPU utilization
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Memory Utilization
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Disk I/O
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Network traffic
To enable persistent metrics, Web Console requires “Performance Co-pilot (pcp)” and cockpit pcp plugin. Follow the screenshots to install and enable persistent metrics.
Use the Web Console → Terminal to install a couple of packages and restart the Web Console socket.
yum install -y cockpit-pcp systemctl restart cockpit.socket
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When the socket is restarted, your Web Console connection will reset and require you to login again. |
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You should also refresh your broswer for the option Store metric to be visible.
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Now enable persistent metrics.
RHEL 8 comes with several pre-canned performance tuning profiles from Tuned. Since this is a virtual machine, the default profile “virtual-guest” was selected. You can easily switch profile via the Web Console web UI. In this exercise, we will change the profile to “throughput-performance”
Under the networking section, you can monitor current networking activities. You can create network bond, team, bridge, and vlan driven by GUI
Also under the networking section, you can configure your firewall rules. In the following example, you will find and enable NTP firewall rule.
Now that NTP firewall rule is enabled. Let’s make sure NTP service is enabled and running under the service section
Web Console also allows you to start/stop, restart, enable/disable a service on your RHEL 8 server:
This concludes a short exercise with Web Console. Feel free to click through and explore other sections:
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Under Accounts section, you can manage user accounts on your RHEL 8 server
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Diagnostic Reports allows you to create sosreport for Red Hat support
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Under Kernel Dump, you can enable/disable kdump