UBOS Linux now available on EspressoBIN

[jernst]

UBOS is a rolling distro for x86 (PC and cloud), Raspberry Pi’s, BeagleBone’s and now also the EspressoBIN — in beta.

UBOS makes installation and maintenance of web applications really simple, e.g. let’s say you want to run WordPress on your EspressoBIN:

> sudo ubos-admin createsite
(answer a few question, including which hostname, admin account, and name of the app(s) to run)
(wait a couple of minutes)
(WordPress is running)

Or you want to back up to Amazon S3:

> sudo ubos-admin backup-to-amazon-s3 –bucket <S3bucketname> –createbucket
(enter AWS credentials)
(wait a bit)
(Done)

More info: http://ubos.net/blog/2017/06/11/beta11-available.html

(Hope it’s okay to make this announcement here in the forum — if not, please suggest a better place)

[cuddlepuncher]

This software looks great! jernst, can you point me to the most active place of UBOS discussion. I have some questions about it and some details I’m not sure about. Thanks.

[jernst]

Glad you think so, cuddlepuncher! Well, there was some discussion today at the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, OR, and I expect more at Indie Web Summit tomorrow and Sunday.

On-line: list is here: http://ubos.net/community/ — or if specific to EspressoBIN, just continue this thread.

[cuddlepuncher]

I was reading some of the documentation and came across the network configuration settings. If I wanted to replace my home wireless router/firewall could I just install UBOS and set it to “gateway”? Will it also handle being an access point if I install a wirless mini pcie card on the espressobin?

I’m thinking about picking up a second espressobin to run my webapps(nextcloud, selfoss, more eventually) separately from the other if I use it as a router/firewall.

[jernst]

Hi cuddlepuncher,

running apps like NextCloud or Selfoss on an EspressoBIN that also acts as a home router with SATA hard drive is exactly why I’ve been very excited about the EspressoBIN.

The WiFi should work (although I have not been able to test yet … lead times for the module are quite long) but unfortunately the UBOS “gateway” configuration does not work yet as it should. At least UBOS does not automate it yet. I have posted various questions about just how this is supposed to work in various places, but no answers … (Some on this wiki)

I’d really like
1) one upstream interface (“wan0”) that
2) two local interfaces (“lan0/1”) but with different IP addresses, so we can attach different routing policies.

I’ve attempted to copy the settings as they are in Ubuntu and Arch as described here, but I’ve always ended up with strange configurations not ready to ship to people.

Globalscale — do you have networking documentation in progress? Coming soon? Never?

[cuddlepuncher]

Yeah, this is a very nice board with lots of potential for self hosting and router/firewall use cases. It’s the first board that I feel like put all the effort into the right areas for use as low power home servers. I think it’s early days but having openwrt, arch, debian etc. already is a really good sign.

I will keep an eye on the gateway functions of UBOS. I will try it out with nextcloud and selfoss for now and hopefully it can also replace my router in the future.

[cuddlepuncher]

If you’re still watching this thread I have another question.

I got ubos installed and working on my espressobin and installed selfoss and nextcloud. They work great on my LAN but I’m not sure how to get access to them outside my LAN over the internet. For example internally I would go to https://ubos/nextcloud but away from home I could go to https://mydynamicdns/nextcloud and it would point to my home IP? Can I specify mutliple hostnames for a site with ubos-admin utility? Or is there a better way to accomplish what I’m trying to do with ubos?

I am currently running selfoss this way on my current server that I manually configured with nginx and specified 2 hostnames then forwarded port 443 to the server’s IP.

Another question: How do I enable additional nextcloud apps that aren’t enable by default in NC12?

[jernst]

Re DynDNS, you have a couple of choices:
* If you have a dynamic DNS setup, say at abc.dyndns.org, when you create your site with ubos-admin, use that as a the hostname.
* or you can use hostname *, in which case you can only deploy a single site to your EspressoBIN, but it will respond to any hostname that points to that device.

For additional Nextcloud apps, speccify those as “accessories” during “ubos-admin createsite”.

Happy to hear that it is working for you!

[cuddlepuncher]

Ok, So far I haven’t been able to figure out how to configure hairpin nat on my router to successfully resolve my ddns name from inside my LAN. I’ll have to have another go at that.

Is there a list of which Nextcloud apps I can specify?

[cuddlepuncher]

Oh, I thought of another question. Is there any ubos functionality to configure it as an NFS server? Or would I just need to do it manually?

[jernst]

There is currently no nfs support in UBOS, mostly because it’s so hard to secure nfs.

Re available packages, all the headless “apps” and “accessories” in UBOS can be listed with
pacman -Sl hl (“list all packages in the hl (headless) repository”).

[cuddlepuncher]

Thank for the reply and for you hard work on this project. I really appreciate it.

I only use NFS internally. Is it still considered insecure just to be running it on a server if that server is connected to the internet? Even if nothing NFS related is forwarded through the firewall?

[jernst]

Have any webcams on your home network? Ever had a virus on your laptop? Run buggy software? Have friends (or have kids, and they have friends) who connect unknown devices to your network? Only place where I would run nfs is in a closed, well-managed (enterprise) network where I know all the parts and manage them myself.

[cuddlepuncher]

No cams at all yet and any that will possibly be used will be RPi and camera module setups put together and configured by me. I haven’t had a virus on my machines in probably over 10 years and I only have linux machines on my network (mine and my wife’s). I have a separate guest network for friends/visitors so nobody else on the network that has NFS running. Everything on my network is configured by me and I manage and configure my router myself.

So, are you against any kind of file sharing on your home network then? Is there something other than NFS that you use that you feel is more secure?

[Author]

Posts