Alright, thanks for your insights from an outsider. It is always a difficult task to accurately judge your own projects if you’re intimately familiar with it. So I will see what I can do about the things you mentioned

Alright, I see your points.

Now that you have spent a lot of time discussing it, even looking at the code, one thing that would be valuable for me would be how accurate your expectations are based on what you read here compared to the actual app. If it is pretty much as expected, then I guess at least my summaries are accurate. If it’s not, then I can still do a better job at that part. Fundamentally changing the project itself is a little bit too late, but at least the communication can be changed on why people could use it. And I’m not trying to gain a new user here as it’s probably not for you, but still would be interesting to me. You can give it five minutes and use the .tar.gz or the .appimage if you don’t want to install anything.

Thanks for taking your time to write this.

I think the main point I’m trying to figure out here is whether this is a communications issue, i.e. how I describe it is not optimal or whether this is a fundamental project issue. Because I think I have a clear vision and target audience, I am part of that audience myself. The thing is, there isn’t one standout feature. The value comes from the combination and integrations of multiple features that work together and allow for a smooth use experience. I can say it has support for SSH, docker, kubernetes, hypervisors, and more but all of that on an individual layer isn’t that unique, it’s the combination that you can use all of them together. But this is difficult to put into words, trying it out for yourself for a few minute usually yields better results.

About the shell commands, that is one of the standout features about it, so it’s on purpose. I know this approach is more difficult and error prone than doing some kind of native library stuff, but it also allows me to run the same commands in remote shells on remote systems.

Yeah I am still trying to figure out how to explain it the best way to convince people to give it a try

For normal SSH this is all accurate, maybe I should have focused on wider topics.

Staying in the realm of SSH, where the integrations of XPipe produce added value is for example when it comes to virtual machines. If you quickly spin up a VM in a hypervisor such as Proxmox or KVM, it’s not that straightforward anymore. If you want to reach a VM running on a remote hypervisor host, you probably have to first use the hypervisor host as a jump server to be able to access the VM and the first place. You have to determine the external IP of the VM (which might be frequently changing), check if any kind of guest agents are available, check whether an SSH server is running (and start it in the VM shell if not). And only then you can type ssh user@host to that VM. XPipe will do that all automatically. So from your perspective, you only click on it and it will perform all these tedious tasks in the background and boot you into a terminal session.

The open core version provides almost all features in the community edition. It is not completely there yet, because in practice some components are difficult to separate or to include in the source since everything is in the same build. E.g. the whole licensing code is present in the community build as you can upgrade the license in-place, but that code is not part of the public source code and in a completely standalone build, this part is still required.

So it’s currently not fully possible to release the core component as is alone, but if you clone it and run in your own development environment, any components that are not included but required are fetched from an existing xpipe installation on that system. So cloning the community repository and running the dev build works fine.

I wouldn’t really say that though. It is aimed to make the whole process require less typing, make it more ergonomic, require less thinking, and speed it up a bit compared to if you’re doing it manually. There are plenty of expert options that you can use to fully customize your connections and your workflow.

Among the active users, there are many experienced professionals who use it because it makes their life easier.

Yeah most of the things listed can be done with any command-line SSH client, XPipe aims to improve the user experience for these tasks and also make them faster / take less time typing. I would argue you can save quite a bit of time if you use it correctly. And there is support for more than just plain SSH.

I would just recommend you to try it out for like 5 minutes. If you still don’t see the point of it, you can just uninstall it and move on

I see. About other RHEL distros like Rocky, these are available for free in xpipe. Is just limited to very specific distros like RHEL itself and Oracle Linux as there’s usually an enterprise reason why those are chosen.

So the vision is that this is only a connection hub, essentially a mediator that brings together your tools like terminals, editors, command-line clients and more. XPipe itself doesn’t have an SSH client, it just uses your locally installed one. Same goes for text editors, terminals, password managers, git clients, browsers, and more. It doesn’t replace anything, it works with your tools.

About unifying GUI access for your homelab, I guess that is personal preference. Some people like a gui-based workflow, some do like a more terminal focused experience. But with XPipe you can get both. You can use it as a quick terminal launcher if you don’t want to use any of the other GUI functionality. For example, if you are a frequent SSH user, see my other reply: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31552343/16245994 on how it can make your life easier. You can try it out for a few minutes to see how it works for you, you can get started very quickly and there is no setup required on any servers. There’s no commitment here.

If you like automation, there is also a built-in HTTP API (which you have to enable first). You can automate almost anything with that. The documentation for that is available here: https://github.com/xpipe-io/xpipe/blob/master/openapi.yaml and if you like python, there is also https://github.com/xpipe-io/xpipe-python-api

For the professional use case, the same concept of a connection hub apply here. XPipe doesn’t manage your keys, you can use whatever storage format or SSH agent configuration you want. If you use a password manager in your organization, you can connect that to XPipe and have XPipe itself not store any secrets. In terms of transit security, it just forwards everything to your locally installed SSH client for example. If you care about all the security details, you can find them at https://xpipe.io/assets/documents/Security in XPipe.pdf .

You can deploy this in your organization with whatever tools you use. Maybe the .msi with intune, or some other management tool for Linux and macOS. There are standard installers available for every use case. These can also handle updates, so if you disable automatic updates within the app and instead want to manage that yourself, you can use the installers to upgrade installations in-place with the latest releases from GitHub.

About the data storage and usage, if you want to use shared vaults in your organization, these are all handled via your own git client and git remote repositories. You can host them wherever you want. You get a full history of who did what in that vault with git automatically.

If you are looking for key points from the perspective of a heavy ssh CLI user, you can think of it as a fancy wrapper around your existing SSH client and configuration. It will automatically detect your SSH config and supports exactly the same set of features and options as your SSH client as it internally uses that one. It doesn’t try to replace your existing SSH client and configuration, it works with it.

What it will add:

• You have direct access to all systems running on the servers you connect to, e.g. docker containers, using the exact same graphical interface. On the CLI you also have that in theory, but that’s tedious

• You can bring your shell environments / init scripts / aliases with you in a noninvasive way. I.e. you don’t have to modify the remote system dotfiles, when you connect through xpipe it will set up any scripts you want to have available automatically

• You can link up your password manager with your SSH client and other connection methods that require passwords

• You have the ability to synchronize your connections and environments through git, including your SSH configs

• You get special integration for SSH tunnels that allows you to toggle them to start / stop in the background and open tunneled services in the browser automatically

• You get an overview over all your remote connections and can access the file system of any connected remote system via a uniform graphical user interface, allow you to use your own desktop text editors instead of terminal-based ones. It also supports dynamic sudo elevation, so you can also save files as root without having to login as root

• Plus all the integrations for other tools as well. For example, you want to connect to a certain VM guest in in a hypervisor via SSH but it is not reachable from the outside? XPipe can connect you to it through the hypervisor host, automatically determine IP addresses, and open a terminal session instantly

Yeah that is implemented under the assumption that these distros are most of the time used in enterprise contexts. I know that this is not always the case, there is the option to upgrade to a license at no additional cost to the next tier if you’re only using it for personal use. Just send me an email I can upgrade it for you.

And out of curiosity, is there a particular reason why you chose Oracle Linux for your personal server?

Anyone who manages some kind of servers, virtual machines, containers, etc. That can be in your homelab or also at your job if you are doing that professionally. So assuming that you are selfhosting something, you can get some use out of this. And the more stuff you selfhost and have to manage, the more useful it becomes.

Glad you like it!

Yeah it definitely had issues in earlier versions, but I think it’s slowly getting there over time. Development just takes some time.

Feel free to share how it works for you now

Yeah I limited the community version to free operating systems. Because if you are using something like RHEL or Windows Server, you are probably using it for some commercial purpose. Not always but most of the time.

Virtualized windows? As in Hyper-V? Or what are you referring to

In terms of xen support, I plan to implement an XCP-ng integration next

Yes, that is the idea. Over time I hope to provide integrations for most other hypervisors that are not supported yet and various other tools. But it’s getting there, a big chunk is already implemented.

As I mentioned in reply to another comment of yours, the main difference in my opinion here is that I am posting this as an individual one-man company compared to something like Oracle. And the Oracle free tier still requires you to sign-up and provide your data. This free version does not have such a commitment.

A lot of projects are sharing status updates and development news and various platforms, some on lemmy as well. On average, I post status updates every 1-2 months when there is something to share. And yes this is self-serving, I am advertising my project after all.

I think blocking me would be a bit overkill? You could also just downvote the posts you don’t want to see and move on, you don’t have to read my posts if you don’t like them. That is up to everyone themselves. People who are interested in these posts can do the opposite.