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Comment by k_bx | Hacker News Reader

While I am using cockpit every time I need to remotely manage the machines, I couldn't get it to log me in via something other than user's login/password, which are not that safe, and it listens to 0.0.0.0 by default too.

So I have to ssh into machine, start cockpit service, use it, and then stop the cockpit.socket once I finish.

Would be great to have something which has its own users/passwords (to have strong password in bitwarden) and doesn't listen to 0.0.0.0 by default. If it's also lightweight – even better!

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You can use a localhost Cockpit with SSH Port Forwarding.

> Configure Cockpit to listen only loopback/127.0.0.1[1]:

[Socket]

ListenStream= #This remove 0.0.0.0:9090 bind based on the docs

ListenStream=127.0.0.1:9090

> Execute in your machine a port forward with SSH[2]:

ssh -N -L 9090:127.0.0.1:9090 host@ip

> Then you can open localhost:9090 in your browser securely only using SSH (that is already part of your actual workflow).

[1]: https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/listen

[2]: https://coder.com/docs/code-server/guide#port-forwarding-via...

Yes but if there's going to be something lightweight and correct-by-default I'd prefer that, mostly because I have many machines to manage and a team of people to educate. I'd like default to be good instead of wasting time and risking.

If you’re using libvirt, you can do a remote connection through ssh with virsh or Virtual Manager desktop app.

I thought cockpit use pam, so you can use other pam modules to log in.

Can you explain a bit more? The user passwords are inherently not strong enough so I disable all ssh via password and only use private keys (id_ed25519). If cockpit allowed me to use one I'd be ok, but if they don't – I at least want some scary auto-generated password only for cockpit, not the system user's one (which is often very weak).

so bind cockpit to 127.0.0.1 and use ssh port forwarding?

You could also have a more strict password policy but I don't know that I'd ever want to expose something like cockpit to the raw Internet.

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