Houston UI: the easiest way to see it working

If Ceph and ZFS are the engine, Houston UI is the dashboard — and it’s the fastest way to actually see what “open source storage” means, rather than just read about it. Houston UI is 45Drives’ name for a set of modules built on Cockpit, Red Hat’s open-source web-based server admin console, extended with 45Drives’ own open-source plugins for storage-specific tasks.

Screenshot: Houston UI / Cockpit dashboard overview
(placeholder — add a real screenshot from your own deployment)

What you actually get in the dashboard

File and block sharing — configure SMB, NFS, iSCSI, and (on supported backends) S3 shares from a browser, without hand-editing smb.conf or /etc/exports.
ZFS management — create pools, manage datasets, schedule snapshots, and watch pool health, all visually.
Ceph deployment — bring up single-node or multi-node Ceph clusters through a guided Ansible-backed workflow instead of raw ceph CLI commands.
User and identity management, hardware health, benchmarking — day-to-day server administration without needing to live in a terminal.

Most of it is a real, actively-maintained open-source project

This isn’t a proprietary UI 45Drives built once and stopped touching — most of it is a family of public GitHub repositories, actively maintained, that anyone can inspect, fork, or contribute to. Checked directly against the live repo.45drives.com/enterprise/debian package list, not assumed:

Module	What it does	Source
`cockpit-file-sharing`	Manages Samba, NFS, iSCSI, and (for supported backends like Ceph RGW, MinIO) S3 shares	Public
`cockpit-navigator`	A full-featured web file browser	Public
`cockpit-zfs`	Interactive ZFS pool/dataset administration (successor to the archived `cockpit-zfs-manager`)	Public
`cockpit-identities`	User and group management	Public
`cockpit-hardware`	Hardware health monitoring for 45Drives storage servers	Public
`cockpit-benchmark`	Built-in storage benchmarking	Public
`cockpit-ceph-deploy`	Guided Ceph cluster deployment via Ansible	Public
`cockpit-scheduler`	All-in-one task scheduling module	Public
`cockpit-2FA`	Two-factor authentication for Houston UI logins	Public
`cockpit-autotier-status`	Displays live status for `autotier`	Public
`houston-common`	The shared library the other modules are built on — actively updated, not a one-off	Public
`cockpit-super-simple-setup`	A setup wizard specifically for simplifying initial 45Drives server configuration	No public repo, but readable JS/TS in the package
`cockpit-alerts`	An alerts manager built into Houston UI itself	No public repo, but readable JS/Python in the package
`cockpit-storage-encryption`, `cockpit-45drives-hardware`, `cockpit-45drives-branding`	Storage encryption management; hardware/branding variants	No public repo

Why the “quick and easy show” matters

Distributed storage and copy-on-write filesystems are genuinely complex under the hood — that complexity is exactly why the industry has historically sold them wrapped in expensive, proprietary management consoles you had to trust blindly. Houston UI makes the case that you don’t have to trade transparency for usability: the dashboard is friendly enough for day-to-day administration, and most of the modules behind it are public source you (or anyone) can read. A few aren’t published as a formal GitHub repo — but extracting those packages directly (see Storage Encryption and WireGuard) shows most of those are still plain, readable JavaScript and Python, just not published with version history. Worth checking for yourself rather than assuming either way, which is exactly what this table and the pages it links to are for.

See it yourself

Nothing here beats seeing it live. Head to Build Your Own for a real, documented walkthrough of standing up this exact stack — Ceph or ZFS, Samba/NFS/S3, and Houston UI on top — using 45Drives’ own open-source tooling.