On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 4:10 PM Gianluca Cecchi <gianluca.cecchi@gmail.com> wrote:
Is cockpit supposed to run on plain CentOS hosts?
I didn't have it installed: possibly because it started as a hypervisor host in version 3.x when cockpit not available.
During updates it has not put in as a requirement package.

I manually installed it and then enabled/started the cockpit.socket systemd unit.
It seems started and I can correctly connect to https at tcp port 9090, but when doing a status of the cockpit.socket unit I see 
Oct 09 15:59:01 ov300 update-motd[22990]: /usr/share/cockpit/motd/update-motd: line 24: /run/cockpit/active.motd: No such file or directory
Oct 09 15:59:01 ov300 ln[22998]: /bin/ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘/run/cockpit/motd’: No such file or directory
Oct 09 15:59:01 ov300 systemd[1]: Listening on Cockpit Web Service Socket.

Line 24 of /usr/share/cockpit/motd/update-motd :
printf 'Web console: %s%s\n\n' "${hostname_url}" "${ip_url}"  > /run/cockpit/active.motd

and on the host 
[root@ov300 ~]# ll -d /run/c*
drwxr-x---. 2 chrony chrony 60 May 24 16:18 /run/chrony
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root    5 May 24 16:18 /run/chronyd.pid
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root   root   40 May 24 16:18 /run/console
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root    5 May 24 16:18 /run/crond.pid
----------. 1 root   root    0 May 24 16:18 /run/cron.reboot
[root@ov300 ~]# 

Is this a bug? Can I manually create the " /run/cockpit" directory?

Thanks,
Gianluca
 
It seems that a reboot of the node is "sufficient" to solve the situation.
The cockpit.socket unit is active and the /run/cockpit directory has been generated...

[root@ov300 ~]# uptime
 16:44:48 up 3 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.04, 0.08, 0.05
[root@ov300 ~]# 

[root@ov300 ~]# ll -d /run/cockpit/
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 80 Oct  9 16:41 /run/cockpit/
[root@ov300 ~]# 

 [root@ov300 ~]# ll /run/cockpit/
total 4
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 84 Oct  9 16:42 active.motd
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 11 Oct  9 16:41 motd -> active.motd
[root@ov300 ~]# 

[root@ov300 ~]# systemctl status cockpit.socket
● cockpit.socket - Cockpit Web Service Socket
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/cockpit.socket; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (listening) since Tue 2018-10-09 16:41:39 CEST; 1min 22s ago
     Docs: man:cockpit-ws(8)
   Listen: [::]:9090 (Stream)
  Process: 995 ExecStartPost=/bin/ln -snf active.motd /run/cockpit/motd (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 986 ExecStartPost=/usr/share/cockpit/motd/update-motd  localhost (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Tasks: 0

Oct 09 16:41:39 ov300 systemd[1]: Starting Cockpit Web Service Socket.
Oct 09 16:41:39 ov300 systemd[1]: Listening on Cockpit Web Service Socket.
[root@ov300 ~]# 

Gianluca