Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 43 posts

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#31

Post by imiric »

nodesocket wrote: post #16
imiric wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that there's appeal in a single-binary tool that implements the core features of something like Proxmox. Proxmox is a complex project that requires dedicating an entire machine to it. I'm not familiar with Kimchi or Cockpit, but OP's claims sound reasonable. There are/were other even simpler tools like the similarly named flintlock, Incus, Lima, plain virsh, and many others. But most of them don't have a w…

Besides your spamming concern (which isn’t really that big of a deal) are you concerned this could be malicious? That’s my concern. How would they inject their malicious code besides the obvious of in the installer (main/install.sh) script?

I can't really say what their intentions are. It could be an elaborate scam to get people to sign up for cloud hosting, and then disappear, as their original project did.

They're also distributing binaries that can't be guaranteed to have come from these sources. So even if the AI slop has no malicious code, they could still be injecting it from somewhere else.

I don't know, and frankly, don't care. I would just caution people to not trust projects showcased by random accounts, since assholes have much more powerful tools at their disposal now.

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#32

Post by ironhaven »

lioeters wrote: post #4

I like the sound of it, especially the compact single-file executable with minimal dependency. Forgive me for my ignorance, I may not fit the target user profile - I'm not familiar with KVM, and have only occasionally used QEMU. I read briefly about Cloud Init when setting up Multipass for creating new Ubuntu VMs. What is KVM? - https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM Can this tool `flint` replace…

Quick summary of the technology is that there is two software parts for virtualization, the hypervisor and the virtual machine monitor.

First is the hypervisor that uses the hardware virtualization features of your cpu to emulate hardware interrupts and virtual memory paging. This part is usually buint into the operating system kernel and one will be prefered per operating system. Common ones are Hyper-V on Windows, Virtualization.Framework on Mac and KVM on Linux

With the kernel handling the low level virtualization you need a Virtual Machine Monitor to handle the higher level details. The VMM will manage what vm image mounted and how the packets in and out of the vm are routed. Some example of VMMs are QEMU, VirtualBox and libVirt.

Flint, the app being shown is a vibe coded web app wrapper around libVirt. On the bright side this app should be safe to use but it also does not do much beyond launching pre made virtual machines. As a developer the work you need to do is provide an Linux distribution (Ubuntu, etc), a container manager (Kubernetes, Docker) and launch your own containers or pre made ones from the internet (Dev Containers).

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#33

Post by lioeters »

ironhaven wrote: post #32
lioeters wrote: post #4

I like the sound of it, especially the compact single-file executable with minimal dependency. Forgive me for my ignorance, I may not fit the target user profile - I'm not familiar with KVM, and have only occasionally used QEMU. I read briefly about Cloud Init when setting up Multipass for creating new Ubuntu VMs. What is KVM? - https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM Can this tool `flint` replace…

Quick summary of the technology is that there is two software parts for virtualization, the hypervisor and the virtual machine monitor. First is the hypervisor that uses the hardware virtualization features of your cpu to emulate hardware interrupts and virtual memory paging. This part is usually buint into the operating system kernel and one will be prefered per operating system. Common ones are Hyper-V on Windows,…

That's a very helpful summary, much appreciated. It helped me understand the layers involved.

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#34

Post by ccheshirecat »

For clarity: Hypr Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202520273N), AS211747 HYPR-NET, is an infra-focused startup working on microVMs, virtualization, and novel approaches to infrastructure. We are independently managed and only active in the infrastructure space; other accounts or projects are unrelated.

Infuze was ours but has since been shut down so we can focus fully on our own architecture. There has never been any scam, nor anything remotely related to one.

The Show HN post about the lightweight VM manager is unrelated to any cloud business. It started as a quick personal tool and unexpectedly resonated with people, so I iterated on it the same day. It’s just a minimal Go wrapper around libvirt, not connected to our core work.

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#35

Post by fulafel »

jurgenkesker wrote: post #13
lioeters wrote: post #4

I like the sound of it, especially the compact single-file executable with minimal dependency. Forgive me for my ignorance, I may not fit the target user profile - I'm not familiar with KVM, and have only occasionally used QEMU. I read briefly about Cloud Init when setting up Multipass for creating new Ubuntu VMs. What is KVM? - https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM Can this tool `flint` replace…

KVM is just your Linux Kernel Virtual Machine. So you can manage VM's on Linux. It is not related to Docker.

Docker products are a maze of naming confusion. If comparing to Docker Desktop (which exists for Linux too) then it's related since that's also a virtual machine system.

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#36

Post by k_bx »

natebc wrote: post #27
k_bx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain a bit more? The user passwords are inherently not strong enough so I disable all ssh via password and only use private keys (id_ed25519). If cockpit allowed me to use one I'd be ok, but if they don't – I at least want some scary auto-generated password only for cockpit, not the system user's one (which is often very weak).

so bind cockpit to 127.0.0.1 and use ssh port forwarding? You could also have a more strict password policy but I don't know that I'd ever want to expose something like cockpit to the raw Internet.

Yes but if there's going to be something lightweight and correct-by-default I'd prefer that, mostly because I have many machines to manage and a team of people to educate. I'd like default to be good instead of wasting time and risking.

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#37

Post by k_bx »

sergsoares wrote: post #24
k_bx wrote: post #2

While I am using cockpit every time I need to remotely manage the machines, I couldn't get it to log me in via something other than user's login/password, which are not that safe, and it listens to 0.0.0.0 by default too. So I have to ssh into machine, start cockpit service, use it, and then stop the cockpit.socket once I finish. Would be great to have something which has its own users/passwords (to have strong passw…

You can use a localhost Cockpit with SSH Port Forwarding. > Configure Cockpit to listen only loopback/127.0.0.1[1]: [Socket] ListenStream= #This remove 0.0.0.0:9090 bind based on the docs ListenStream=127.0.0.1:9090 > Execute in your machine a port forward with SSH[2]: ssh -N -L 9090:127.0.0.1:9090 host@ip > Then you can open localhost:9090 in your browser securely only using SSH (that is already part of your actual…

Yes but if there's going to be something lightweight and correct-by-default I'd prefer that, mostly because I have many machines to manage and a team of people to educate. I'd like default to be good instead of wasting time and risking.

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#38

Post by Nullence »

While I like the layout and having a good UI for managing virtual machines this project lacks any security features at all.

Most notably, if you just set the auth cookie to "authenticated" you will have access to spin up as many VMs you like on any flint instance in the wild (08-09-2025).

As such this is an incredibly unsafe project to use. Probably because of the vibe coding :(

Re: Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

#39

Post by flessner »

Nullence wrote: post #38

While I like the layout and having a good UI for managing virtual machines this project lacks any security features at all. Most notably, if you just set the auth cookie to "authenticated" you will have access to spin up as many VMs you like on any flint instance in the wild (08-09-2025). As such this is an incredibly unsafe project to use. Probably because of the vibe coding :(

Vibe coding by itself isn't a problem.

The problem is vibe coding AND negligence. Good software practices like testing, code review, documentation are bound to catch the LLM-isms.

No offense on the author, the project specifically calls out that it's a "young" project in the footer, so I personally wouldn't expect it to be quite up to spec yet.

Post reply on HN