This is the third part in my series on self hosting. Check out Part 2!

Running a server isn’t just about remotely hosting your own services. It’s also about remotely managing it. In the sense that you should be able to monitor the server’s health, manage users, and services, and keep it secure. SSH gives you access to all the tools you need to manage your server, but it’s not always the most user-friendly way to do it. That’s where administration tools come in.

SSHing into your server just to edit the firewall rules every single time isn’t fun. Administration tools are designed to make your life easier by providing a graphical interface to manage your server, for example, to manage your firewall rules, users, and services.

Good administration can help keep your server secure, monitor its health, and respond to issues quickly. In this post, I’ll be talking about some tools that can help you manage your server.

Cockpit

One very common and noteworthy tool is Cockpit. It’s a web-based server management tool that allows you to manage your server from your browser. Some server distributions even come with cockpit pre-installed. It’s a great tool to monitor your server’s health, manage services, and users. It also has a terminal feature, so you can run commands on your server without having to SSH into it. It can replace your need for Cloudflare’s SSH browser terminal.

RHEL ships Cockpit by default. By default, you can access it by visiting https://your-server-ip:9090 in your browser. For installing it, I’ve attached a few resources below, based on your distribution.

• Cockpit on RHEL
• Cockpit on Fedora
• Cockpit on openSUSE Leap
• Cockpit on Ubuntu
• Cockpit on Arch Linux

If you’ve installed it and the service is enabled, but it’s not working, you might need to open the port in your firewall. You can do this by running the following command:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=home --add-service=cockpit --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Visit https://your-server-ip:9090 in your browser to access Cockpit. Since it uses a self-signed certificate, you might get a warning for the first you visit it. Just proceed to the site. You should see a login screen, to which you can log in with your server’s username and password.

Already, you can see the server’s health, the services running, and the system logs. You can also manage users, storage, and networking. It’s a very powerful tool that can make managing your server very straightforward.

Cockpit also has a variety of extensions that you can install to add more functionality to it. For example, you can install Cockpit Podman to manage your Podman containers.

To modify the firewall rules, you can go to the networking tab and click on the firewall section. You’ll need to get administrative access. You can then add or remove rules as you see fit.

Configuring the firewall is a very important part of server administration. Since you’re running a server on your home network, you might be exposing your entire network to the internet. It’s important to secure your server and network properly. I’ll be covering security practices in a future post

If you scroll down the sidebar you’ll find the terminal.

It’s a good idea to also expose Cockpit to the internet using Cloudflare Tunnel. Make sure to secure it with a strong password, and for extra security, use Cloudflare Access to restrict access to only authorized users.

UptimeRobot

Another tool that can help you manage your server is UptimeRobot. It’s a service that monitors your server’s uptime and sends you alerts if it goes down. It’s a great tool to have in your arsenal to make sure you can respond quickly if something goes wrong.

It’s an external service, so it doesn’t require you to install anything on your server. You can set it up to send you alerts via various methods. I use UptimeRobot to send a message on a discord webhook if my server goes down. It’s a great way to get notified if something goes wrong.

You will need an HTTP server running on your server to receive the webhook, and probably have to expose it using Cloudflare Tunnel.

Do note that UptimeRobot only checks your server’s uptime. It doesn’t provide any other server management features like Cockpit does. It serves as an auxiliary, separated from your server, to monitor its health. Think of it as someone doing a welfare check on your server every 5 minutes.