friday afternoon is always a good time to finalize travel arrangements. While train and hotel for next weeks Univention Summit have already been booked last week, this friday it was time to nail down the hotel for the upcoming FOSDEM. One thing that I am especially looking forward to is the Sustain Summit 2020 which is held the thursday before FOSDEM. So if you are in Brussels from the from the 30th of january till the 1st of february and want to meet let me know.

Using Kopano Meet has gotten even easier Link to heading

Back in the first issue of this newsletter I have introduced you to Cloudron. This week the Cloudron Meet app was released, while its not the first Cloudron app I have created/contributed to its the first with a direct Kopano relation.

Another Kopano thing - Kopano WebApp and Franz/Ferdi Link to heading

Last week I introduced Franz & Ferdi as a means to easily/conveniently access web based application. After sending out the last newsletter I’ve spent some time and made an (absolutely basic) integration for Kopano WebApp: https://github.com/fbartels/franz-webapp

How to makes services accessible from the outside? Link to heading

I am lucky enough to have both a static IPv4 address and a router I can freely manage port forwardings with at home, but in the ago of CGNAT not everyone is as lucky as that. So what are your options when you cannot just setup a dynamic dns domain and set up some port forwardings?

Apart from the low level approach to utilise a server with a static ip, vpn and routing/proxy individual ports through the vpn, there are also some tools to make these connections easier to manage. The following is a small list of such services:

Web based cloud management Link to heading

mist.io is a platform to centrally manage both physical, virtual and containerized deployments (incl. the ability to run scripts and Ansible playbooks on the deployed machines).

An interesting project, but also one with a lot parts and dependencies.

Web based management for (Docker) containers with Portainer Link to heading

A much lighter application, but limited to containers is Portainer. It’s a simple container that one can execute and portainer even offers agents to connect multiple hosts with each other. Sadly, though it does not support version 3 of the docker-compose file format.

Easy web based terminals with ttyd Link to heading

ttyd can be used to share single applications or whole terminals through a browser. Through other utilities like Tmux or Docker it can be used to have short lived sessions to get Teamviewer-like remote assistance or to have a permanent and isolated ssh jump host.

Automatically restart unhealthy containers Link to heading

Health checks are a good tool to monitor the container world. But what if the health status is degraded? Similar to Watchtower docker-health can constantly query the Docker API and automatically restart any degraded containers.

Updates Link to heading

  • code server is a web based version of Visual Studio Code. Just like ttyd it gives you a terminal to you server, but at the same time also a full editor and file browser (and even supports some of the extensions of VS Code).

I am always looking for new projects to try out! Just send a mail to selfhosted-newsletter@9wd.eu.

I hope you have enjoyed this issue. If this newsletter was useful to you please recommend it to colleges or tell them to subscribe to it via RSS.

Have a nice weekend! Felix