Red Hat Cockpit

Red Hat Cockpit is the user interface that enables you to manage and configure how your Gateway operates on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. You can:

• Apply network configuration
• Manage software upgrades
• Perform system monitoring
• Manage user accounts

To access the interface, open a web browser with the same IP address as your Gateway UI, on port 9090, for example: https://10.11.12.13:9090/

Clearswift

You can access product information including the current version number and product name, using the Clearswift tab.

You can also complete a number of Product Actions:

• Reset UI access control restrictions
• Reset administrator account password
• Enable online repositories
• Temporarily enable USB storage

Network Services

You can make changes to network services, that will be automatically deployed to the Gateway.

When modifying network changes via Cockpit, it is necessary to restart the network to ensure those changes are applied and re-initialized correctly. As a consequence, there may be a short window (up to 5 seconds) when network services such as DNS will be unavailable. In the event of this operation causing any policy failures, you are advised to re-submit those requests, or re-process those messages.

We recommend doing this at an off-peak time, as there will be short interruptions to services while the configuration is being updated and the network is restarting.

Please note that it can take up to five minutes for the network configuration changes to be fully deployed.

• Static Hosts

  You can specify the address and alias details of any number of static hosts to the Gateway, avoiding the need for a DNS request for the host's details. The Gateway always looks for an address first in its static hosts table, only making a DNS request if it finds no match.

• System Proxy

  The System Proxy is the proxy that the Gateway is using to connect to the Internet. This is also the proxy used to download and apply software updates.

• NTP Config

  This allows you to configure the NTP server (or servers) used by the Gateway.

Software Updates

The Software Updates tab displays any available updates, including updates in the following categories:

• Security: highlighted red for importance
• Other: including Clearswift updates

You can either install just the Security updates, or all the available updates from the Software Updates tab.

An alarm will be raised in the Gateway Admin UI when updates are available. You can install them via this tab.

Monitoring Services

Monitoring Services include support for SNMP Servers and SCOM Servers.

• SNMP Servers

  You can configure the Gateway to send notifications to a pre-defined SNMP management station when an alarm occurs in the Gateway.

  Enter a Server IP address and a Community String for each SNMP server which receives traps that the Gateway sends.

• SCOM Servers

  You can also monitor a Gateway using Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

  For each SCOM server, you must supply the user name of the account used by the SCOM servers for importing SCOM management packs.

  The Gateway currently supports the following SCOM management pack:

  • Microsoft.Linux.RHEL.7.mp (for more information see Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Management Pack Guide)

  The SCOM Server communicates with the Gateway over SSH. In order to register with a SCOM server and receive management packs, the Gateway must have SSH access open to the nominated SCOM Server. See Configuring SSH Access for more details.

  A SCOM server can also receive SNMP traps. To send SNMP traps to a SCOM server, select the IP address of the required SCOM server in the Gateway user interface. See Configuring SNMP and Email for more information.

System

This tab provides a view of the general system health, showing the CPU, Memory, Disk and Bandwidth usages.

Logs

This tab provides a consolidated view of the system logs, as opposed to the Gateway centric logs that are visible in the Gateway Admin UI.

Networking

This tab allows you to modify your network connections, such as enabling additional network interfaces, changing an IP address or adding additional DNS Servers.

When changing the settings for individual network interfaces, make sure you always define the address, netmask and gateway before saving your changes.

Any changes made in this page will be propagated to the Gateway automatically. Please note this can take up to five minutes to deploy and should be done at an off-peak time, as there might be short interruptions to services while the configuration is being updated and the network is restarting.

Accounts

Use the Accounts tab to Create New Account. You can then click an account to make changes, Set Password, or Force Change, forcing the user to provide a password when next logging in.

You can edit an account to give it a Server Administrator role with the Roles check box. We strongly recommend that you create a Server Administrator after installation, and disable the root user account. Server Administrators have edit access in Cockpit, provided the account is not pending a password reset.

Services

This tab allows you to view the state of all system services, as opposed to the Gateway centric services list visible in the Gateway Admin UI.

Terminal

This tab allows you to login to a command line session using the same credentials that you used to log into Red Hat Cockpit.

Advanced Settings

The following settings should only be required in specific circumstances.

• Kernel Dump: Shows kdump status, configuration and allows to crash the kernel to test kdump
• SELinux: Shows whether SELinux is enabled and lists access control errors
• Diagnostic Reports: Collects system configuration and diagnostics information and prepares a report in the .xz compressed format.

See also...

• Getting started with Cockpit (Red Hat official documentation)
• Clearswift password policy