Cockpit Desktop Client blank screen about 15 seconds after logging in

[alexrhyshurn]

Explain what happens

1. I am running Raspberry Pi OS Debian Trixie with KDE Plasma wayland on Raspberry Pi 5, I have installed Cockpit Client via flathub, version 355
2. I have 6 cockpit hosts to log in to, a mix of Debian LXC, Ubuntu VM and one test Fedora 43 VM
3. The desktop client opens and presents log in screen just fine.
4. I can log in to all of the hosts and the overview page is displayed.
5. approx 15 seconds after the overview page loading, the cockpit desktop screen goes blank. See attached screenshot.
6. Immediately after the overview page displaying and before the client screen goes blank, I cannot click anything. E.g. request admin access, or any left menu item

I should point out that accessing each of the hosts with the Cockpit server via firefox on port 9090 works perfectly. It is only the Flatpak desctop client that appears to have the problem.

Version of Cockpit

355

Where is the problem in Cockpit?

Overview

Server operating system

Fedora

Server operating system version

43

What browsers are you using?

Firefox

System log

[allisonkarlitskaya]

My first impulse here is that it's some ARM-related WebKit issue... maybe we're not using it correctly somehow...

[allisonkarlitskaya]

A few questions:

• Are you using cockpit-bridge installed on the remote server systems or are you connecting to systems without cockpit installed?
• Can you see the cockpit-bridge process on the remote machine running before the session dies? Something like watch pgrep -fa cockpit via a separate ssh connection might be useful here
• Does the cockpit process go away when the screen goes blank or is it still running?
• Does anything end up in the journal of the other machine?
• Can you run Cockpit Client via flatpak run in a terminal locally and see if you see any relevant messages? Maybe add G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all to turn up the volume some...

[alexrhyshurn]

Hello,

1. Cockpit-bridge is installed on all the systems. I am only connecting to systems that have a full cockpit installation. I have not heard of cockpit-bridge before, I assume it was installed as part of the overall cockpit installation.
2. Yes I see the cockpit-bridge process.

root@snmp-test:/etc/snmp# ps -aux | grep  cockpit-bridge on the destination system I am connecting to.
sysadmin  161089  2.0  1.7 195448 35540 ?        Ssl  10:20   0:00 /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/cockpit-bridge
root      161218  0.0  0.1   6560  2412 pts/1    S+   10:21   0:00 grep --color=auto cockpit-bridge
root@snmp-test:/etc/snmp# 

3. YEs the process goes away, see below

4. journalctl -xeu cockpit on the fedora 43 server shows "no entries"

5. Below screenshot applies. The flatpak client reports connection unexpectedly closed by peer, and the cockpit-bridge process goes away a few seconds after.

I can consistently recreate this event by logging in with cockpit-client desktop to a fedora 43 system, clicking on Accounts, and then clicking on the > Groups button:

Running the following:

alex@pi-5:~ $ G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all flatpak run org.cockpit_project.CockpitClient

Produces this error on login page. I have attached the flatpak debug output in file.

cockpit-client-debug.txt

Thank you so much for your assistance.

Alex