I just get happier with each passing month that I don’t use windows anymore. The freedom of having my hardware and data no longer serving the corporate interests of the operating system vendor is great.

It was the friends we made along the way

Grandiosa shouldn’t count

After a decade of using the bare minimum vi modes I just yesterday discovered I could use visual mode to jointly indent multiple lines.

I will still prefer pycharm every day of the week over vim, but yesterday I needed to modify code on a server and rebuild some docker containers. I couldn’t be arsed setting up my local env, making a merge request etc and was pretty impressed that a combination of screen, vim, docker compose and git - all available via SSH, was a complete toolset for getting an emergency change deployed and an app running again.

Some wholesome internet right here

that is cool. I hadn’t tried konsole before - there are menus for days in here, I’ll never get any work done lol. Slick, and makes that fedora kde fling I have been considering more tempting.

These days it’s more Spinach Mail Transfer Protocol

Edit after I saw the Popeye comment: Sailor Man Transport Protocol

OK I’ll stop now.

Ouch.

update to say that tabby is nice for ssh including key auth, and with profiles and groups it gets most of the job done. There is an sftp “plugin” but all it does is summon sftp. Will see if I can get it to open filezilla and use the env vars in calling the command. Setting aside RDP for now as guac looks like a good fit there.

Great read, thanks for sharing. Fingers crossed that Nix gets there for you.

I use those tools already and have been administering Linux/bsd/docker for years. What’s new for me is using it as a desktop. The existence of scp, ssh etc dont solve this problem and while I find it interesting to learn how other admins are essentially making their own central console out of these components, it is a bit much seeing commenters insist that this is the same thing, or suggesting that anyone who wants a central console for their remote systems must be somehow incompetent. Sysadmins can have different workflow and tooling preferences.

I will check this out - thank you.

Tmux is awesome. We’ve somehow fallen into using screen at work, I think just old habits. So yes, on the other side of the ssh connections there’s usually a series of screen sessions for us to join. Should try to move onto tmux - it is nicer.

Portx, tabby and guacamole are my contenders so far. Guac would be needed for the graphical stuff - it’s sort of like a jump server running in a docker container that you would vpn into I guess? Neat concept.

That looks pretty good, cheers. Another comment mentioned Tabby, also cross platform.

Both PortX and Tabby seem a whole lot nicer than winsshterm. Shout out to guacamole for a dockerised jump sever solution.

Aha. This would make more sense - couldn’t imagine this was happening on every laptop. Then I should add my device details to a github issue. Thanks for letting me know.

I’ve explained this at length?

Single app with unified hierarchy for all systems sorted by work, home, client, prod, staging. Within each you can choose to use SSH or VNC or RDP or SFTP or scp. When copying files there’s a side by side GUI so you can browse easily. I have done this using various apps in windows for 20 years and couldn’t imagine tracking all those servers/routers/devices without a central console.

It is obviously not the same as manually making all these connections and using different apps for each of them and backing them up with git.

It absolutely isn’t the same, but I appreciate learning that this is how many linux admins manage their connections.

tabby looks neat. already has an mcp plugin - impressive.

This looks seriously impressive - and with a docker. Nice. Thank you.