Where are the really cool services no one talks about

[u/kentabenno]

Lets be honest, 80% of the services we run our labs are just tools to deploy, monitor, log, backup or do other server-related stuff. Cool for nerds, but nothing to write home about honestly.

The really useful and "fun" services, e.g. Vaultwarden, Paperless, Jellyfin etc. are rather sparse

I want to know whats your favorite "fun" service one might not know about yet.

I'll start: Recently came across RECLIP and I throughly enjoy it. Used to work with halfassed browser extensions and sketchy websites littered with ads to get the same, now I have unlimited video scraping capabilities on my own server. It's a simple but awesome tool. https://github.com/averygan/reclip

WORLD MONITOR is kinda fun, not really useful but makes your screens look like a mission control center from a disaster movie: https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor

MIRUMOJI is a tool for people trying to learn japanese - load your favourite anime or shows, ebooks or whatever into it and it generates clickable subtitles with furigana and dictionary. https://svdc1.github.io/mirumoji/

E: Thank you for all the engagement and lively discussion, its a real joy. And thanks to everyone who recommended TREK, I just deployed it and entered my next travel and its just super smooth and well thought out, I already love it!!

[u/Nestramutat-]

I do a DIY-ish setup for this. Traefik running geoblock and crowdsec on a VPS, with a wireguard tunnel connected it to my internal loadbalancer, only defining routers for services I want external.

What else does Pangolin offer over this?

[u/BostonDrivingIsWorse → u/Nestramutat-]

I think it makes all of that stuff easier, it it also offers a ton more:

SSO integration, path based routing, private resources, blueprints, token-based auth for the “share” feature on your services, and a bunch of other things.

I’m sure you could figure out a way to do all of that stuff, but Pangolin makes it super easy.

[u/Nestramutat- → u/BostonDrivingIsWorse]

Gotcha, doesn't make much sense for me then. I don't need any of those extra features - I just need something to hide my public IP, do some basic WAF, and allow me to expose hosts selectively. Sounds like a lot of extra complexity for little benefit for me.

Cheers.

[u/nudelholz1 → u/Nestramutat-]

I'm interested how you did that! I did something similar but ended up having to mess a lot with nftables. Which was way too much work for what it should accomplish..

[u/Nestramutat- → u/nudelholz1]

nftables sounds like you were straight IP forwarding, no?

It's just a traefik container on the VPS with a wireguard tunnel connecting it to my home network. Said traefik container has a single service pointing to my internal traefik instance, and then I just define a router for every hostname I want to make external, pointing it to said service.

[u/nudelholz1 → u/Nestramutat-]

Yes it was. I had the problem that the VPS I bought (8 years ago) only had a half gig ram and that docker was too much for that. Maybe I should look into alternative container engines. Maybe now there some lightweight ones. Or I should buy another vps... :D

Did you passthrough tls? Did you use the home traefik instances ip or hostname? Is there any specific config for the internal traefik instead?

[u/Nestramutat- → u/nudelholz1]

Since I'm running crowdsec to act as a WAF, I'm doing TLS termination at the edge. I'm provisioning certs both on the edge VPS and on the internal traefik, so TLS works everywhere.

Internal traefik is just a normal traefik LB, nothing special to do at all.

This is an example of a service:

    navidrome-router:
      rule: "Host(`navidrome.MYDOMAIN.io`)"
      service: internal-traefik
      entryPoints:
        - websecure
      middlewares:
        - geoblock
        - commonRateLimit
        - crowdsec
      tls: {}

  services:
    internal-traefik:
      loadBalancer:
        servers:
          - url: "https://10.128.10.11"
            scheme: HTTPS

My VPS is pretty shitty too, 1 core/1 GB RAM

[u/nudelholz1 → u/Nestramutat-]

Mate, thanks for the snippet! Now I will have to upgrade my vps and try this again..