Managing multiple hosts at the same time

Cockpit allows you to access multiple hosts in a single session, by establishing SSH connections to other hosts. This is quite similar to logging into these other hosts using the ssh command on the command line, with one very important difference:

Code from the local host and all the remote hosts run at the same time, in the same browser context. They are not isolated from each other in the browser. All code effectively has the same privileges as the primary session on the local host.

Thus, you should only only connect to remote hosts that you trust. You must be sure that none of the hosts that you connect to will cause Cockpit to load malicious JavaScript code into your browser.

Therefore, Cockpit will warn you before connecting to more than one host. It is also possible to disable multiple hosts entirely, and some operating systems do this already by default.

You can prevent loading of JavaScript, HTML, etc from more than one host by adding this to cockpit.conf:

    [WebService]
    AllowMultiHost=false
  

When you allow multiple hosts in a single Cockpit session by setting AllowMultiHost to true, then the user will be warned once per session, before connecting to the second host. If that is still too much, you can switch the warning off completely by adding the following to cockpit.conf:

    [Session]
    WarnBeforeConnecting=false