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Navigating Sandstorm
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Navigating Sandstorm

uptimeuptime Member
edited August 2019 in General

so ... I set out to install a kanban, and ended up with a sandstorm. And now my todo list is well into the yo dawg dimension. :smiley:

Needless to say I'll be spending some quality time with the sandstorm.io docs, and whatever other random sources of insight I might find on the web. I have found just a few mentions here on LET, going back a few years - including a recommendation from @vimalware to check out sandstorm and several associated applications ...

Anyhoo ... I surely would appreciate any fresh suggestions from the low-end point of view - specifically as to possible shortcuts to learn the important things, and possibly if any areas maybe better to avoid. And also, which of the available apps stand out for better or for worse? Any surprises or discrepancies from the docs?

The aspects that are most important to me, in general:

1) security
2) simplicity

My use case at this point is mainly experimental, to see what some of these janky php (etc) apps have to offer by way of inspiration, and if at all possible to glean some immediate usefulness for simple things like kanban, chat, etc. At the moment planning to involve just a couple other users: one is non-technical (with some ideas for an application), the other with a good bit of circa-2000 web development experience. So there's no big enterprise requirement here, but I'd like to be able to present (as much as possible) a simple, painless experience for these two end users and then take it from there, with or without sandstorm.io in the mix.

What I've done so far:

On a fresh 4 GB ram / 4 shared vcore / SSD kvm vps

0) installed Debian 10, setup firewall and nginx
1) setup wildcard DNS and LetsEncrypt for SSL
2) setup outgoing email for authentication purposes (any email at the domain can be sent a token)
3) created an admin account and a normal user account in sandstorm
4) played with wekan and rocketchat, and a few other apps

What's next:

1) easier authentication for end-users: setting up LDAP (and possibly SAML)
2) review setup and study documentation, especially with regard to potential security issues
3) looking for quality rather than quantity in terms of other apps to explore, but am generally interested in good examples of minimalist UI
4) maybe actually using wekan (or some other kanban) - which is what I originally set out to do a few days ago, lol ...

Also, one more possible issue I may or may not care to get into eventually:

Might I expect potential conflicts if also running Docker for other things (ie, Discourse) on the same server - or would it be best to just leave this VPS entirely for (a lightly used) sandstorm? I had originally been scheming to use this one for Discourse - so, depending on how resource-intensive Discourse and the sandstorm stuff turn out to be, I may shuffle either Discourse or sandstorm onto another VPS (or dedi).

tl;dr: comments and suggestions about any or all of these areas (sandstorm, security, authentication, LDAP, applications, kanban, Discourse) would be much appreciated!

Comments

  • OujiOuji Member

    The problem with Sandstorm is that after they fail as a company, the develop got stagnated and I don't know if that's still the case (it was two months ago), but a lot of apps are heavily outdated.

    Sandstorm itself is not too heavy, I ran for a while alongside Yunohost on a 4GB VPS, but I was having issues with the LE wildcard cert and couldn't use the built-in https service because it required the port 443 every week to renew.

    I think the documentation is quite good, but because it wasn't updated for a while, there are few references that end in broken links.

    I was able to successfully link Yunohost's LDAP with sandstorm quite easily. The backup of the data is very easy on it as well. As soon as I stop suffering from trying to setup my dedicated proxmox, I'll spin up a vm and use sandstorm again.

    Thanked by 2uptime vimalware
  • leapswitchleapswitch Patron Provider, Veteran

    There are separate Docker templates available for Kanban, Discourse etc. Instead of hosting 1 Docker and 1 Sandstorm in the same server, why not deploy them as 2 Docker containers?

    Have you seen our CloudJiffy platform? You can deploy multiple Docker containers in their own self contained Virtuozzo containers and each container auto scales up/down to minimize resource usage and cost.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • vimalwarevimalware Member
    edited August 2019

    I fear sandstorm as a project, lost its shining star momentum(i just saw Kentonv with a flurry of commits on the git log :smiley: ) when Kenton joined Cloudflare.

    I'm actually trying to run dokku on a 6gb ram openvz7 and see what breaks.

    Yunohost is also on a weekend bucket list.

    Cloudron looks like one of the the most actively curated and developed personal PaaS.

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • Navigating a SandStorm is very hard to sometimes. You need to cover any orifice sand can get into, and you can not see shit. They can even blot out the sun/moon so you can not navigate by those either.

    You could spend days wandering around inside and never see anyone.

    Just sad when you think about it.

  • OujiOuji Member

    vimalware said: I fear sandstorm as a project, lost its shining star momentum(i just saw Kentonv with a flurry of commits on the git log :smiley: ) when Kenton joined Cloudflare.

    I'm actually trying to run dokku on a 6gb ram openvz7 and see what breaks.

    Yunohost is also on a weekend bucket list.

    Cloudron looks like one of the the most actively curated and developed personal PaaS.

    Yunohost is very good to be honest, I'm just moving past it because I feel I need a solution that won't require me to take backups in different ways (ie YNH has its own built-in backup tool, but it won't backup all apps and if you install something differently you'll need to make a backup job for it yourself). Also I'd like change the branding, but I'm not good in CSS and web in general. But I do recommend YNH for people that want a platform that is simply plug and play for most of the apps in the store.

    Cloudron is also very good, but their pricing was updated and now it is really more proihibitive and I find it hard to use apps that aren't in their store. Even when it was $15/mo I didn't like it, now it feels worse for me at $30/mo.

  • AuroraZ said: You could spend days wandering around inside and never see anyone.

    yeah ... this is typically what happens whenever I decide to make a "todo list" ...

    I end up spending more time than I should reading an article from two years ago on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13860027

    okay, I think I'm over it now!

    thanks @Ouji @leapswitch @vimalware and @AuroraZ for sharing your thoughts / suggestions / experience / (and etc.)

    @leapswitch I'll take a look at cloudjiffy, seems like an interesting approach

    currently I'm of the opinion that sandstorm (etc) are still useful for quick exploration of various web apps but probably no magic bullet for putting things into production ... so I'm probably not going get too deep into the weeds with any of these - my goal is to keep things simple, and secure.

    The way I currently do that is generally (ideally) spin up a fresh KVM instance for testing an unfamiliar app, get some sense of resource use and possible quirks, and then see what longer-lived home the app might find among my collection of erstwhile idlers. This is my low-end, small-batch, artisanal approach. :)

    Thanked by 1vimalware
  • SpeedBusSpeedBus Member, Host Rep
    edited August 2019

    uptime said: kanban

    https://wekan.github.io/ comes to mind on Sandstorm

    Edit: Just re-read the post and saw you already tried wekan :sweat_smile:

    Thanked by 2uptime AuroraZ
  • Obligatory

    Thanked by 1uptime
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