Cockpit as NAS management solution

[mlincett]

Given the very nice progress on the storage management side, I open this thread to discuss the potential usage of Cockpit to manage a NAS / storage server as a potential contender to dedicated and opinionated platforms. I hope this thread will serve as a guidance for whoever intends to test Cockpit as managing interface for their NAS.

My intention is to:

• index relevant issues and feature requests concerning the usage of Cockpit to manage a NAS or storage server;
• brainstorm potential feature requests that are in-scope with the Cockpit project;
• check feature parity with common NAS solutions (OpenMediaVault/OMV);
• brainstorm potential ideas for plugins.

Storage

The Cockpit storage UI is very neat. It has however still some limitations.

Devices

• Power management, acoustic management and spindown time cannot currently be configured. Possible feature request?
• SMART reporting is currently limited: "Device health" reports only a subset of SMART attributes and the full table of smart attributes is not accessible. Extended attributes were briefly discussed:
  • Detailed SMART info in disk details #15010
  • storage: SMART support #19103
  • UPDATE: new issue Display all SMART attributes #21842
• Propagation of warning about storage errors is being discussed
  • Warn about storage errors #15460
• SMART polling can wake up disks that are otherwise in spun down state. smartctl allows to avoid polling disks in a given power mode with the -n option. Cockpit relies on udisks via DBUS, and my understanding is that udisks has an hardcoded polling interval. Relevant udisks issues:
  • Please let me configure the housekeeping interval or otherwise unbreak externally configured spindown storaged-project/udisks#407
  • 10 Minute housekeeping_timeout keeps Western Digital Drives awake. storaged-project/udisks#892
  • SMART polling wakes up not mounted disk disregarding UDISKS_IGNORE storaged-project/udisks#993

Filesystems

• It is not possible to create or manage multi-device btrfs volumes
  • btrfs: multi device support #19961.
• Support for btrfs snapshots is limited
  • btrfs snapshot support #20208

File sharing

Storage shares

The concept of a storage share is an abstraction of NAS software frameworks, so it is extraneous to Cockpit. Shares can be created by creating (mounted) subvolumes, like in OMV. This is quite trivial with Cockpit.

NFS and SMB management

NFS and Samba shares can be configured with the 45Drives plugin. I have not tried this extensively, but seems to provide most of the typically required functionalities.

Scheduled tasks

• An UI for scheduling tasks is provided through Service / Timers. The main limitation here is that only system timers can be created and timers cannot be edited
  • services: No ability to edit timers #9467
• NAS management softwares provide wizard to schedule typical tasks, among which: SMART checks, filesystem snapshots and rsync tasks. It could be nice to develop a plugin that allows to create timers based on such presets (with dropdown selections for devices and filesystems) and only displays such timers in dedicated table.

Container management

Container management is supported via Cockpit Podman. Current limitations are:

• no support for Docker (out of scope);
• no direct support for compose files
  • Podman-compose support cockpit-podman#247

All in all I believe that advanced container/stack management is better left to dedicated platforms and the current philosophy oriented to podman and systemd makes sense in the Cockpit perspective.

[tomillr]

Great ideas! That would make Cockpit ideal for anyone looking to setup a customizable NAS or homelab.

[gloryandel]

I am currently using ArchLinux as my NAS and installed Cockpit. I really like Cockpit because it is based on Linux local users and is not overly abstract. This way I can combine UI + CLI. The basic services of NAS are storage, sharing, and services (containers).

1. Storage: too little storage is supported, RAID (creation, conversion, expansion)
2. Sharing: Sharing based on authenticated users. I use smb.conf include = /etc/samba/users/%U.share.conf to enable different users to log in and view different shared directories.
3. Container: Currently, the most critical technology for NAS is container. Cockpit integrates podman, but it is only for "viewing". The creation and conversion functions are very weak. All in all I believe that advanced container/stack management is better left to dedicated platforms and the current philosophy oriented to podman and systemd makes sense in the Cockpit perspective. In fact, professional container management tools are often not integrated with systemd, but deeply integrated with compose (Docker)

[Venefilyn]

All good points! Do you wanna raise them up separately as GitHub issues? That way people can find it easier and work on it if there is anything

AFAIK none of these are on our timeline currently

[gloryandel]

Thanks, I need some time to sort it out, because Cockpit is only a little bit away from being the ideal NAS. It would be great if someone could implement it.

[jelly]

Sharing should ideally be a separate plugin and it does exists in the form of cockpit-file-sharing

[kekylin]

I have been using Debian+Cockpit as HomeNAS for many years. The experience is very good. I like it because it is lightweight, efficient, safe, stable and free.

I also created a project to share its usage ideas, but this project is in Chinese and may not be very friendly to non-Chinese users.

This is the address of the project. Interested friends can check it out.
https://github.com/kekylin/Debian-HomeNAS

[tomillr]

I also created a project to share its usage ideas, but this project is in Chinese and may not be very friendly to non-Chinese users.

This is the address of the project. Interested friends can check it out. https://github.com/kekylin/Debian-HomeNAS

Interesting indeed! Too bad, it's only in Chinese.

[git2212]

I have been using PI4/5 based NAS (up to over 2000 terabytes now) for years and Cockpit for the last two or so when I got tired of looking at the CLI only (we all need a little color in our lives don't we?) ... I run ZFS Storage pools and support for it in Cockpit has been rather basic... occasionally the package updates break the UI... another issue that needs sorted ;)
You want to make Cockpit the defacto NAS management UI... add extensive (and reliable) support for array management... in addition to all the boilerplate stuff about shares/permissions etc.

[hrhnick]

I cobbled together a basic Docker plugin that is designed to work with stacks, similar to Dockge. It's really rough around the edges, but it lets me manage some basic Docker stacks/containers: https://github.com/hrhnick/cockpit-docker-manager

[hyserski]

I recently installed Almalinux on my home server with intention to use with Cockpit like I was using OpenMediaVault (but on enterprise linux with more ,,mainstream tools"). I'm really liking cockpit, but all of those mentioned things would be a treat to have.