Applications to get the most out of your servers
Core-Admin includes by default lots of useful applications to help you administrate and track the state of your servers. To know at any time what’s going on in your servers is key to anticipate problems and solve them.
See a few examples
The following are some of the default applications that are included in all Core-Admin editions. Other Core-Admin editions, like Core-Admin Web edition, includes additional applications.
IP blocker: easy blacklisting
The IP blocker is a really useful tool that will help you to easily block any IP you want in a manner which is compatible with your firewalls.
It features a design that allows temporal or permanent blocking, and it provides support for a scriptable API that many parts of the Core-Admin platform uses to automatically block unallowed sequences, thus, these blacklist operations can be handled easily from a grafical interface. See it in action:
Viewing and managing running processes
Processes and services viewer tool will help you to have an easy and visual way to show current processes running in your system. It provides a useful brief where top cpu, top swap and top IO processes are shown (along with other aspects).
The tool also provides an easy to use way to restart services and to locate the most appropriate service associated to a process that you think is consuming too much cpu in order to be able to restart it. The tool also provides useful options to find memory mappings, hidden removed files and much more. See it in action:
Manging log files and file systems to watch
Log and file system watcher manager is the graphical interface for the Core-Admin log watcher daemon (crad-log-watcher). This service is in charge of watching your log files to track growth speed so if a certain threshold is exceeded a warning is generated for revision. The tool also allows to configure expressions that must be watched inside logs, optionally providing commands that must be called when those expressions are found.
Along with previous support, the tool also allows to configure which file systems should be watched by the log watcher daemon and what database expression should be used optionally to trigger warnings when certain expressions are found. Among other features, this tool will allow you to configure the Core-Admin log watcher daemon to detect things like:
- Unallowed/unexpected modifications in binaries and other modifications like hacked web files.
- Track expressions inside server’s logs that, for example, are signs of an imminet hard disk failure (which SMART may only detect them many hours or even days later!)
- Run commands when something happens (for example, like sending a SMS when some really important customer writes you).
See an example of log watcher manager in action on the right.
Easy global cron management and tracking
Core-Admin includes an easy to use cron manager that will help you to manage global crons for all systems users in an easy way. It will help you to properly format cron entries and to attach an internal description to easily identify each entry.
Together with the Core-Admin checking system, Core-Admin will notify you when a modification is done to a crontab (so you can keep track about what is being done in the system).
In the case of the Web edition, the Webhosting management application includes especific support to let hosting users to modify their cron entries without interfering others and ensuring those cron entries run with the same hosting system user.
Manage network interfaces without pain!
Haven’t you ever thought that management of network interfaces should be easy? Core-Admin includes a powerful network interfaces administrator that includes lots of options that makes it really easy to change interface’s address or to add a new IP address to your server.
The tool is designed in at way it allows to save and apply or just save so you can reboot safely after applying all changes (allowing to have a running and a saved configuration). Moreover, it includes lots of additional checks to ensure wrong data doesn’t get to the configuration file.
The tool also comes with additional protections to detect changes introduced directly into configuration files that didn’t come through Core-Admin, to avoid overwriting them, which otherwise may cause problems on the next reboot.
Doing external checking of other systems (but easy to configure!)
Core-Admin includes a powerful and easy to use external checking tool. You can enable it on any of your servers to check external services with a few clicks. The interface allows you to configure basic external checkings like TCP connect, ICMP echo, and other especific services like SSH, HTTP, IMAP, POP3, FTP…
This allows you to cover external machines that aren’t supervised by Core-Admin’s internal checking (like network elements or other servers that doesn’t run it). This application provides a Nagios-like checking system but configurable through the panel, easy to deploy and the most important, it is integrated into the Core-Admin notification system.
Being integrated into the notification system means you’ll get notifications produced by this application along with the rest of the notifications. Moreover, current configuration about how to route these notifications (by email, by sms, etc) will also apply.
Integrated MySQL management
MySQL is at the heart of many applications and setups. Therefore Core-Admin provides an easy to use MySQL administration solution that will provide you access to currently configured databases, users and their permission rules.
This way, it is possible to easily create new databases and MySQL users with a few clicks and without having to remember administrator passwords!
System users management (forgot a system password?)
Core-Admin includes a really easy to use system users administrator tool that will help you to easily create and manage system users at any of your servers with a few clicks.
The tool may also help you to recover root password (as long as there’s a running core-admin agent).
Easy certificate management, including Let’s encrypt support
Core-Admin includes extended support to manage your server’s certificates, no matter how they are used. It includes a general Certificate management for custom applications, Web Certificates integrated with your Webhosting management tool, or let’s encrypt certificates that can be easily integrated with all your Core-Admin Applications.
Powerful Firewall manager
Core-Admin includes a powerfull firewall manager that integrates with all the security and blocking tools, allowing to fully manage it easily from the Core-Admin web console.
It features load balancing, progressive rule loading, tag-oriented administration and a wizard that allows to easily create rules from blocked traffic.