Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#1

Post by pmdfgy » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 12:34 PM UTC

Hi everyone,

I've just released the public repository of RebootX On-Prem (https://github.com/c100k/rebootx-on-prem), letting anyone to connect and manage their infra on their smartphone.

In my case the infra is pretty simple : 3 Raspberry Pi. But I'd love to have your feedback and see interesting use cases you could use this for.

I have lots of ideas for the next steps. For example, creating a Prometheus integration as well.

Looking forward to hearing from you and I would be glad to help if you encounter any issue getting started with the repo.

Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone
github.com

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#2

Post by moondev » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

An underrated advantage of ChromeOS is easily running mobile apps that expose intuitive UI like this. Combined with the floating window mode I have enjoyed using bambu handy for 3d printing and vSphere mobile.

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#3

Post by INTPenis » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 6:10 PM UTC

I think it's very complicated and I'm not sure what it does, or why it has a go http server and calls itself a specification.

But it's clear that your goal is to reboot on-prem servers through your phone. Something I've wanted to do with rundeck and a very simple web app that uses the rundeck API.

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#4

Post by doublerabbit » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 6:22 PM UTC

Does it have FreeBSD support and any instructions for not using it with docker?

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#5

Post by rudasn » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 6:55 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #3

I think it's very complicated and I'm not sure what it does, or why it has a go http server and calls itself a specification. But it's clear that your goal is to reboot on-prem servers through your phone. Something I've wanted to do with rundeck and a very simple web app that uses the rundeck API.

How happy are you with that setup? Would you use it for anything more complicated, like app deployments or maintenance tasks on your on prem / vpss?

I'm using ansible right now, and a custom playbook.sh script for some sort of auditing - what was run where and by whom. Kinda works but much more maintenable than let's say ansible tower.

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#6

Post by pnutjam » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #3

I think it's very complicated and I'm not sure what it does, or why it has a go http server and calls itself a specification. But it's clear that your goal is to reboot on-prem servers through your phone. Something I've wanted to do with rundeck and a very simple web app that uses the rundeck API.

webmin

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#7

Post by leptons » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 8:13 PM UTC

I've been managing remote (and local) servers from my smartphone with RDP and SSH for almost 2 decades, not sure why I would use anything else.

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#8

Post by HenryBemis » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 8:20 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #7

I've been managing remote (and local) servers from my smartphone with RDP and SSH for almost 2 decades, not sure why I would use anything else.

I've tried from a bunch of different phones to use RDP, and apart from launching some SW/service or run a batch, I just cannot without the pixels/screen. It's just too darn small. I wonder what smartphones you got.. some phablet with 7"-8" or a typical 6"-6.4"?

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#9

Post by jokethrowaway » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

neat but ssh from your phone is hard to beat

Sharing my current use case in case it's useful:

reboot PARTITION: to reboot to a different partition

systemctl stopping a service and starting another

launching a wget checking if wget is still up and hasn't crashed

Re: Show HN: Manage on-prem servers from my smartphone

#10

Post by nickpsecurity » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 8:56 PM UTC

If you use Python, you can restart the computer in one line using subprocess. Example:

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python-script-to-restart-comp...

You can also use two scripts for security:

1. One that’s privileged for the shutdown command.

2. One with no privileges to accept the network request (eg Flask/REST), safely parse it, and send a message to process 1.

You could send the message in many ways. It doesn’t even have to be parsed or contain more than one byte. The reboot process might act if it receives any message from the other process in their dedicated channel.

Set both of these processes to run on startup however you normally do on your system.

If not a message, you could have the network enabled process write to a file in a shared directory. The reboot process periodically checks for the file’s existence. If it sees it, then it reboots the system. That file can be cleared on startup. I say on startup to reduce the risk of any kind of contention causing a problem later on.

The reboot process could also be easily ported to a systems language for resource efficiency. I’d keep the network-facing app in a memory-safe language just in case. D or Rust could handle both, though.