Cockpit 168

Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 168.

Improve checks for root privilege availability

Many actions, like joining an IPA domain or rebooting, can only be performed by an administrator (root user).

Cockpit previously checked if the user was a member of the wheel (used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Fedora) or sudo (used in Debian and Ubuntu) groups to enable these actions. Simple group checking was insufficient, as different group names are used by other operating systems and configurations, or a system might be set up to rely on custom user-based sudo rules.

Cockpit no longer makes assumptions about special groups. Now, Cockpit simply checks if the user is capable of running commands as root.

As a result of this fix, privileged operations now work by default with FreeIPA, which uses the admins@domain.name group.

Try it out

Cockpit 168 is available now: