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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I used to use Alpine containers but I’ve since standardize on Debian completely. Proxmox is Debian, my VMs run Debian, my LXCs run Debian, my VPSs run Debian, Raspian on my RPi is Debian, Armbian on my Odroid is Debian, etc, etc.

    The benefit of running the same distribution on all my servers no matter where or how they’re hosted can’t be overstated.

    Less mental overhead remembering different commands or config paths, same software on everything, etc. It’s been fantastic and Debian has always been rock solid for me.







  • Awesome, that seems like a great idea. Since as I understand it, the app is essentially just running terminal commands, I think showing the currently running command would be a huge UX improvement. It would help both with knowing what’s going on and with debugging any issues with the commands.

    Right now I’m traveling and my home VPN connection isn’t working for some reason, so I don’t have access to most of the VMs I usually use daily, but as soon as I get access again I’ll get them all added and really give this a proper test drive. I’ll report any issues I run across or UX suggestions I can think of. It’s great to see how well you take feedback!

    Also funny enough, just due to talking about iTerm2, I went and downloaded it and found out about the split panes feature and I think I may now be a convert haha.


  • Just reopened the app and tried it again and figured out what happened. I had not entered a password in settings when adding the server since I connect using an ssh key. It detected I had docker but when I tried to click it, it errored out. If I had read the error, I would have seen that the problem was needing the password for sudo. I added the password to the server settings and now it’s working.

    I guess then the only real “bug” I found so far is that on macOS the app defaults to using iTerm2.app which is a 3rd party terminal app which I don’t have installed, so I had to change it to Terminal.app. I know iTerm2 is popular, but I think the default should be the one everyone has installed, and let iTerm2 users select their app in settings, not the other way around. But that’s more a UI/UX/onboarding experience thing than a real bug (though maybe it’s possible to detect if iTerm2 is installed).

    Anyway, I’m going to keep playing with this and will report anything I find. So far my second impression is that it just overall feels kind of sluggish and doesn’t have the best UI feedback when you’re waiting for things so I ended up clicking things more than once not thinking it was working then it would open multiple times (like clicking the root file directory).

    Hope to see you keep working on this, it seems like a really cool idea.


  • Just downloaded this and tried it out on a Debian VPS I have. Ran into a bunch of bugs to the point I couldn’t really do anything with it, but I can see a bunch of potential in the UI. I really like the idea of being able to see an overview of shell, containers, files, etc. I have a bunch of self hosted Proxmox VMs and various VPSs I use on a daily basis, and whole I’m totally comfortable with the command line, this tool seems genuinely useful.

    It seems like you have a bunch of functionality and UI implemented already, so I think taking a few weeks to just bug hunt would be super beneficial at this point. I’ll open up some GitHub issues when I have a minute later, but I ran into so many bugs in just 5 min that it was basically unusable which is extra frustrating because it really seems like it can be a useful tool if it works.



  • I have an issue with my cell carrier blocking traffic to my home WireGuard server. It works from everywhere else and other cell services so I know it’s them. I’m definitely gonna try out Tailscale to see if it’ll get around it. Thanks for the tip. Too bad about the battery drain but I’m usually only hopping on for a minute to run a few commands over ssh or whatever so shouldn’t be a big deal.



  • Interesting… I also saw some people post about the self hostable open source version Headscale, so I’m going to play around with it. Tailscale gets recommended so often there must be something to it, I was just always put off by having to rely on a company to access my personal stuff which is sort of the whole reason I self host in the first place… but if I can self host the Tailscale coordinator that changes things.

    I’ve been happy with vanilla WireGuard for my use case but it’s always nice to learn about other options.



  • I still don’t fully understand the benefit over plain WireGuard for a home lab use case…

    I set up wg-easy (WireGuard socket container with built in web interface to easily generate certs for clients) in about 5 minutes on an odroid (like a raspberry pi). Opened a single port on my router. Generated certs for my phone and laptop using the web interface in about 30 seconds. Changed one line in my client configs to only route network on my home’s IP range over the VPN so I can connect without disrupting my internet connection. Then I just activate the VPN and I can access all of my home services. (writing all that out kind of makes it sound complicated but literally this was done in like 10 minutes total and never had to touch it again except to log into the web admin to make certs for new clients occasionally)

    Since Tailscale is a mesh VPN like Nebula, wouldn’t I need to install and set it up on all of my servers and VMs instead of just one to access everything? And then every new VM I make I would have to manually set that up too? Wouldn’t that be harder to setup over all than a single wg-easy container?

    I feel like maybe I don’t fully understand how Tailscale works because it never seemed more convenient or better than vanilla WireGuard and it just uses WG protocol under the hood anyway but with the added dependency of a 3rd party service I have to trust and that can go down disabling my access to my home network…


  • Oh my home NAS I started this way and it worked great. I only bought an HBA card because I needed more ports. Your mobo probably exposes your SATA controller as a PCI-E device that can be used via pass through in a VM. In my case I booted Proxmox off of NVME drive and passed my SATA controller to a Debian VM where I just use simple NFS and Samba for sharing and SnapRAID for drive parity (but TrueNas should work just as well).

    I had zero issues with it and when I upgraded to an HBA card I just switched the drives to those ports and switched the PCIE device I was passing through and everything just worked (helps I always mount using partition UUIDs).