Cloudron Forum

marcusquinn

Cheers for everything @girish & @nebulon

Now get off the computer and enjoy the festivities wherever you are!

Ho ho ho

marcusquinn

Superdesk is an open source end-to-end news creation, production, curation, distribution and publishing platform developed and maintained by Sourcefabric with the sole purpose of making the best possible software for journalism. It is scaleable to suit news organisations of any size.

I can see the principles applying to other industries too

marcusquinn

Joining this community and finding so much collaboration, I wonder if, when all the craziness settles, would people be interested in a meet-up?

I've always wanted to visit Berlin, and as much for a social gathering as geek-talk it could be something fun to work towards?

Not expecting some kind of big-effort conference but perhaps getting people together would be good for sharing ideas, getting to know the people behind the handles, and networking to see what else we might do with all this collective experience and enthusiasm.

Fun for 2021 anyone?

marcusquinn

"Framadate is an online service for planning an appointment or making a decision quickly and easily. No registration is required.

Here is how it works:

Create a poll
Define dates or subjects to choose from
Send the poll link to your friends or colleagues
Discuss and make a decision"

Looks OK, Rallly is the best alternative contender I've found: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3279/rallly-alternative-to-doodle

marcusquinn

"Open Source Document Management System for Digital Archives
Designed for scanned documents. Perfect software that will help you reduce paper clutter and keep your business organised."

The OCR looks decent and maybe better for personal use than MayanEDMS, which also looks excellent.

I can see it being a good pairing with Invoice Ninja / Firefly III.

marcusquinn

I just messages someone about the Cloudron forum and liked my quote on it too much not to share:

"One of the most positive and proactive communities I've joined. It's like a System Admin's therapy group "

marcusquinn

"Attendize is an Open-source ticket selling and event management platform and is everything you need for a successful event. Attendize has a wide array of features aimed at making organising events as effortless as possible."

marcusquinn

I'm thinking knowing this can help build the community and customers, that ultimately invest in a platform we all seem to enjoy. Likes & reviews on these places could help.

I'll start, quite an easy one and common I'm sure: https://alternativeto.net/software/cloudron/

Previously tried Cloudways, Runcloud, D2C.io, all pretty good - but Cloudron just spoke to me for the low entry point for personal use, large variety of apps we already use and were setup with more complex K8S and multi-server/provider setups.

Just made complete sense to consolidate a lot of that and optimise for single-server setups with a more accessible admin interface that didn't require high-level dev-ops in-house for the more common needs of any open-source-first and privacy-conscious people or team.

I try to @mention Cloudron regularly on Twitter too on comments on other large open source account tweets for a bit more interest from those likely to find the same satisfying time-saving I'm here for.

marcusquinn

"GrapesJS is an open-source, multi-purpose, Web Builder Framework which combines different tools and features with the goal to help you (or users of your application) to build HTML templates without any knowledge of coding. It's a perfect solution to replace the common WYSIWYG editors, which are good for content editing but inappropriate for creating HTML structures. You can see it in action with the official demos, but using its API you're able to build your own editors."

Would pair nicely with Surfer & Mautic / Mailtrain

marcusquinn

@plusone-nick said in Proposal: Free-Tier Alterations :

Provide a one time "Update" subscription/service

Anything that encourages people to run outdated software for free sounds like a nightmare and irresponsible to me.

Sorry, but none of this makes any sense.

People pay $10/month for music and video subscription services where they never own the data.

$15/month for what can replace many other paid services is a time-waster filter in my opinion.

Decent System Admins are in the $50-250/hour range. I seriously think Cloudron is too cheap sometimes.

As far as I'm concerned the current pricing is very generous and accommodating for my needs.

I feel it is up to us as the larger network of experienced experts to champion the cause on other chatrooms, forums, social media and business contacts as to how happy we are with Cloudron and what great value it is.

Attracting more developers to app packaging also keeps increasing the value.

I'm trying to get some higher ticket clients onto it, that can then sponsor more of the enterprise types apps.

Maybe if we focus on getting more higher paying subscribes, that will create the economies of scale for a lower pricing on a home tier.

I hate limitations on software - but completely respect paying for luxury add-ons, security not being a luxury.

marcusquinn

Hey, big fan of what you're doing here!

Is anyone interested in sponsored App creation?

As a business, we can budget for this as a reasonable expense and happy to contribute to both the creator and the community with helping fund these things.

marcusquinn

I've been studying and thinking a lot about Cloudron use-cases.

Something that bugs me is how the Microsoft/Apple/Google expectations for schools and children is very exclusive for low-income parents.

I can see that a lot of users here are also hosting and sharing with family.

I wonder if you'd consider a Family/Educational licence tier?

Maybe something like €5/m, given that there's still the VPS and domain to pay for.

I'm thinking it could be full-function, except being limited to just one domain.

I just know parents that don't have landline internet or premium services because feeding the family comes first but then they are expected to pay for expensive software and operating systems for their children not to be excluded from learning technology.

You might have to assess how many users that might already include that might expect to change to this tier.

I suppose it could have an additional approval process for the domain being a personal family domain and not a commercial organisation.

It's your business, so your prerogative, I just wanted to note the thought, not as a campaign against your model but just as a consideration alongside all the many other things you consider.

marcusquinn

We can sponsor the following for anyone wanting to get paid to package?

Need these to migrate over our current instances:

Need solutions for:

Looking at the current rate of App packaging and launch on Cloudron, I can only guess all this might take 5 years unless there's something I'm missing.

So many great Apps but I'm not getting any closer to app system consolidation without having a bunch of these. How can we speed this packaging process up?

Sorry, I'd love to learn and do but just can't neglect current duties right now. What I can do is divert a bit of budget if that helps.

If the community here is in a similar position, perhaps we can have a whip-round and contribute to recruiting for this?

I also have some seriously decent privacy-conscious client potential for all of this - but we have to dog-food anything before we can promote it.

Very happy with Cloudron - all features definitely going in a great direction - but how do we get more Apps into the Store faster? That App Request list is going up faster than down.

marcusquinn

Thinking about websites & apps with regular data-creation.

In the event of migrating from one Cloudron to another, it may be necessary to take the site offline for the transition period to ensure the restore contained all the latest data.

Thoughts?

marcusquinn

@JOduMonT I think the world has change now there's more value in data than people released but capitalism knows and is both; competing to acquire, and exploiting, in ways beyond most people's imaginations - until they find election campaigning shenanigans but don't know what to do about it.

So necessary to trust in services; yes.

Trust them with your valuable and private data?

When Google is reading your shopping email confirmations and Facebook is reading everything with a "Like" script, I think it's a responsibility to have parts of your data world not visible to the marketing world.

Privacy, encryption and permissions should be as essential in schooling for the Technology Revolution as literacy was for The Renaissance.

So - data privacy politics for 6.1 anyone?

marcusquinn

"CryptPad.fr is the official instance of the open-source CryptPad project. It is administered by XWiki SAS, the employee-owned French company which created and maintains the product."

"CryptPad is a private-by-design alternative to popular office tools and cloud services. All the content stored on CryptPad is encrypted before being sent, which means nobody can access your data unless you give them the keys (not even us)."

marcusquinn

I'm sure we all search for "{app name} alternatives" plenty.

I'm also sure we all benefit from Cloudron having more subscribers and growing the team and community.

Therefore, may I suggest a thread for links to places people are finding Cloudron or similar and using all the goodwill, and many people here, to help with some good old-fashioned organic marketing and pr for the cause.

I've added a review and rating here (surferking):

https://alternativeto.net/software/cloudron/about/

Post any other links and I'm happy to do the same, I'm sure we almost all are. Always genuine reviews - but you don't always get if you don't ask

marcusquinn

Who needs Twitter, when we have the Cloudron forum to follow each day

marcusquinn

Hey @girish and @nebulon in the time I've been here, it's great to be a part of what you have created in the platform and the community, and seeing new names all the time appear with brilliant work and ideas really is giving life to Cloudron and everyone collaborating.

I feel that a dedicate "Freelance Work" group would be good for many. There's people here with great skills, and there's people here with clients, budgets, contact networks etc.

I feel that a pinned post at the top of this new group should say something like:

Welcome to the Cloudron community, we hope you will find many like-minds here for making good things happen with the Cloudron platform and community.

If you have work or skills to offer, please post your needs and expectations to announce your availability and interests.

All agreements are between yourselves and the Cloudron forum is simply a place to meet people that can help each other.

Please state your preferred contact method; DM chat in the forum is probably the safest way to share contact details privately.

Be respectful for the value of what you ask for or offer. It takes years of experience to know how to do something in hours and days. Respect your work or your developer commission for the value of the results to you both. Allow for unexpected issues and maintenance.

You can include links to your work if you wish but no affiliate links 3rd-party platforms, and no freelance recruitment platform marketing please.

This is only for person to person networking, so no company promotion please. If you are seeking or know of full-time employment opportunities, that is still a personal networking referral.

Cloudron is not a party to any contracts, offers no endorsement or assurances on the forum members communications and reserves the right to remove any advertising that is not related to the Cloudron platform, Apps and community spirit. Caveat Emptor & Caveat Venditor; Buyer Beware & Seller Beware.

The moderators reserve the right to query any post or member on the legitimacy of their post, remove any post at any time for any reason without obligation for explanation, and all other forum etiquette rules apply.

Welcome to your Cloudron Freelance Work community, and we look forward to hearing what you can all create together!

Something like that

marcusquinn

"From metrics to insight
Power your metrics and alerting with a leading
open-source monitoring solution."

https://prometheus.io
https://github.com/prometheus

marcusquinn

How about a Grid view of My Apps for users and a List view for Admins with more room for shortcut icons?

marcusquinn

"Houdini is an all-in-one fundraising platform developed in Ruby on Rails. It’s licensed under AGPL/LGPL and is available, without cost, to anyone in the world. Houdini allows you to quickly build and deploy anything from simple donation forms for individual nonprofits, to fully featured crowdfunding sites for startups. Developers from around the world are collaborating to make fundraising infrastructure better for everyone. Join our friendly and helpful community, or contact us if you have a project in mind."

https://houdiniproject.org/
https://github.com/HoudiniProject/houdini
https://alternativeto.net/software/houidini/
https://commitchange.com/ (their demo / commercial site)

Seems to use Stripe for payment processing.

marcusquinn

I'm doing a load or research on email and deliverability at the mo.

Mostly Cloudron has a very good setup and trust by default but that needs protecting when there are mass-mailer apps.

Something that would be handy for protecting the server IPs for email deliverability would be sendmail limits per mailbox, to protect from internal and external threats for overzealous sending that would get the IP blacklisted.

I suggest a reasonable default limit to be 50 sent per day, at which point further sending would be queued for sending on the next day and the System Admin would get an email to review the mailbox usage.

This is a basic setting but later additional throttling could be done to ensure sending reputation warm-up is controlled, which would look something like this:

When 50 emails send in one day, pause until the next day and increase the limit to 100.

Then 200, 400, 800, 1,600, 3,200, 6,400, etc, so no-one can burn the IP with a mass-mailer app that hasn't warmed up the sending IP and mailbox according to industry best-practice recommendations.

marcusquinn

@jimcavoli @girish @nebulon I just had my Open AI beta application accepted!!

https://openai.com/

Get me n8n.io on Cloudron and I'll get amazing GPT-3 things built for you!

marcusquinn

Might have to delete this one later then

Spot the dog

At first with the standing desk it was hard work for more than an hour.

Now I stand all day and most of the evening and it feels weird sitting to work. Much better for the brain work too as a your lung capacity is higher when standing for oxygen needs.

It's 2m wide by 1m deep - I already think I need another one for all the stuff to play with and make it a proper home-studio for music, video etc.

marcusquinn

@girish I'll log a ticket with them and keep you posted. This forum is a sys admin treasure trove of useful experience, so it's the least I can do!

marcusquinn

The absence of 2FA on the LDAP login Apps makes me nervous for GDPR and typical security needs nowadays.

I don't know that anyone's ever had a break-in yet, and fail2ban is a good start but expectations for 2FA are increasing.

I wonder if a global solution would be for all Cloudron packaged apps to use a Cloudron login screen with 2FA instead of the app's native logins?

Realising this is development overhead in packaging, open to discussion and alternative suggestions. Hoping this idea is more evolution than revolution.

The more we use any data-silo, the potentially more valuable or attractive it becomes for unscrupulous targeting.

Thoughts?

marcusquinn

Requirements: PHP, MySQL
(optional): Elastic Search, Amazon S3, NodeJS

https://livehelperchat.com
https://livehelperchat.com/new-version-2.16v-co-browsing-387a.html

marcusquinn

I'm a fan of open source and certainly encourage it with my team - but it comes with overhead and responsibilities beyond working on the actual product, so it's not something to take on lightly or without expectation for the time-costs in managing that.

On the flip-side open-source is infinite almost free referral marketing.

From a business point of view, I would think that hosts themselves should be the primary target for sponsorship since the more that can offer Cloudron, the broader their potential customer-base and those customers subscription to their resources.

If Cloudron.io were able to Terraform the Cloudron instances to popular hosts and then the cloudron.io site was the only way to manage multiple hosts with a subscription, I could see value in that because the subscription costs is still less than the time-costs being saved.

I'm fine with hybrid models, we can hire developers to fix issues if they have a higher priority for us than you guys but also it is important to me that the platform commitments we make have a sustainable business model to remain motivated and evolving as needs arise.

Your work, your choice, either way big kudos for what you've already done and thanks for saving me a ton of time and money already!

marcusquinn

The problem with growing up poor, which I know from first-hand experience, is exclusion from certain things your parents just can't afford. Plus, the trend stigmas from not having branded things.

I don't think app restrictions would be fair, as you then make the cost-difference for full-access a barrier to consideration for parents.

I'm hoping for something that the kids would not feel like they have limits but actually have something better than their schools are promoting (and yes, corporate sponsorship of proprietary software is rife, turning teachers into affiliates).

It makes me uneasy that kids being taught via Google/Microsoft/Zoom tools are losing their privacy before they understand what it is.

I can see a "Cloudron for Families & Education" section for the website, perhaps linking to recommended affordable equipment and blogging on how Linux is a 1st-rate, affordable alternative to Microsoft & Apple.

I have a bunch of spare equipment hanging around that I intend to wipe, setup with Linux and donate to families that couldn't otherwise afford.

It just frustrates me that otherwise taxes get skimmed for funding proprietary tools to eventually become a tax on modern life.

marcusquinn

"Kutt is a modern URL shortener with support for custom domains. Shorten URLs, manage your links and view the click rate statistics."

marcusquinn

It's a no - maybe - the shortness of the answer doesn't convince me completely but not an immediate need and with the stories of pretty painless migration I'll post again if I try them again on the subject.

( and plugging Cloudron in all related conversations now )

marcusquinn

"Open Source Messaging Platform for Marketing, Support & Sales"

https://chaskiq.io
https://github.com/chaskiq/chaskiq

marcusquinn

I have 50 people that @mention me in Discord when something's not working, not found a better monitoring solution than users being able to @mention admins 24/7

marcusquinn

For those that don't know, LoRaWAN is an IoT networking technology. The main features are:

The sensors or things are generally very low power, with battery-lives of 10+ years.
The data bandwidth is very low, often a few bytes a second.
The connection range can be very high, 10+ kilometres.
The sensors or things can go in places where there's no wiring, power or wifi, and they can relay messages for almost unlimited distance coverage.

Example usage:

Car park sensors - is there something in this space?
Sonic sensors - how much fluid is in this tank?
Current sensors - how much power is this thing using?
Location sensors - where's my thing?
Movement sensors - is my thing being hit?
Weight sensors - how full is my thing?

etc, etc

The common use case would be to hook up to something like Prometheus or Influx time-series databases for recording measurements over time, then Grafana for charting time-series data, and NodeRED for reacting to measurements as required, perhaps with alerts or responses.

As you can see, we have 2 of the 4 components (Prometheus & Grafana) to make Cloudron a rapid IoT development platform stack.

I can think of many use-cases, the easier this is made, the more things people can come up with?

It's Thursday, did I put the bins/trash out?
Did I leave the oven/lights on?
Where's my kid?

Then for businesses:

How many people walked through my doors?
What's being used?
What needs replacing?

Hopefully that helps explain, and Chirpstack does seem to be the de-facto in this areas, as much as Prometheus, Grafana and NodeRED seem to be the de-facto apps in their areas.

Plus, this is another reason why Cloudron on Raspberry Pii etc is good, as it can give another use-case for off-grid servers that only have a need within a building or property but no need for the outside world to access.

marcusquinn

It consolidates dev-ops experience - that time is precious and life is short.

I've not seen a single other platform that breaks that cycle of continual reinvention and proprietary knowledge silos reliant on too few individuals.

The contribution time needs across a larger invested user-base add up to way more than any single person could.

The most valuable resource to evolving systems is an intelligent feedback loop to test and refine. Thank F we have that here because I was going out of my mind having to do that alone for my own company developments.

The hive mind of Cloudron really does help get some work-life balance back from full-time stack architecture on top of full-time business development.

marcusquinn

@bram Hey Bram - welcome and thank you! Cloudron's a great place to get more feedback and win some fans and promoters for what you do!

marcusquinn

And the worst thing?

The App packaging bottleneck!

There seems to be a lot of gems in the wishlist queue - but there's no way to really know how each can work in practice without having one's own installed instance to mess with.

Most of what has worked so well for me in life has been the ability to test fast — adopt, shelve or eliminate.

I actually think that Cloudron app availability for OSS apps will start to become a significant factor in their growth and contributor attraction too.

Maybe as a team we can help get more of the message out to FOSS devs to get involved with packaging and maintaining their apps for Cloudron?

I realise some have SaaS models to fund their dev - but I also think the Freescout / EspoCRM model works very will: Make the framework FOSS and sell add-ons and templates.

It could be as simple as logging issue to tickets on each of their GitHub repos:

"Packaging for Cloudron"

"Hey, love your app - can you look into packaging for Cloudron?

It would help get more awareness out in the like-minded community.

Maybe cloudron.io needs a "Add your FOSS App" page that puts all these benefits across to app developers to help them understand the advantages for both exposure, audience growth, inspiration and likely their own usage of Cloudron too, when the discover the time-saving and community.

marcusquinn

Hey everyone,

Cloudron has been truly inspiring, and I want to everyone help more for all that everyone involved has been helping me with app packaging and discussion.

I've been in the digital business forever (25+ years) and have a pretty good network of contacts, all needing something, and often something we can solve with the right app(s) and setup(s).

Can I get a show of hands for who is interested in client referrals for app setup, hosting and maintenance services based on Cloudron and the specialist things you can do with them?

Developers, designers, writers, admins, consultants, that sort of thing.

I'm thinking to focus on clients that are willing to pay retainers, whether just for hosting & maintenance or regular consultancy time.

This way we can all use our good experience here and networks to make referrals based on availability and speciality.

I'll also be referring as many people as I can to Cloudron itself. Just don't ever sell-out, you're already worth too much independent, and I want to do all I can to make that more

marcusquinn

@p44 Its also handy when creating a new VPS or Floating IP to check the IP reputation for bad history before using it. Only takes a few minutes and often quicker to just delete the VPS or floating IP and get another one than jump through all the spamlist delisting hoops.

marcusquinn

@plusone-nick I mean as in disk hardware redundancy. Most racks have 2 of everything else. In my experience a simple server setup on a good hardware rack will outperform K8S for uptime. I lost count of the times we were restarting one thing or another with Rancher to get something working that had no reason to fail than K8S getting it's knickers in a twist.

The biggest risk to data loss is always the simple minds of the users!

The biggest risk to availability is always the complex minds of the tools!

No-one really needs high-availability, online banking goes offline frequently for maintenance. If Google has a bad day, people make a beverage and talk to each other.

HA is snake oil in my experience.

marcusquinn

@danboarder FWIW I've been in the web business 20 years, and probably used every server control panel and managed/wordpress hosting, and none compare to the ease and value of Cloudron - for this web guy at least.

I don't know why the source code licence would stop you doing anything you want.

It sounds to me like you have the same options we all went through to end up here and happier.

I'm happy to recommend, and think you'll find Cloudron very time-liberating - but I can't see why the licence model would stop you using it?

Every action has a reaction, and every choice has an opportunity cost.

I guess your options are things like host server control panels like Plesk, managed services like Cloudways. Best I can say is I've been through those and time and gotchyas with those brought me here.

Personally, life experience tells me there's more than enough to do in business, if you have something that solves 90%+ of one area, you've probably got other areas that the freed up time would help you to get to 90%+ solutions in those other areas sooner than holding out for 100% solutions every time.

Don't know if that helps but then I didn't quite get the relationship between a common use-case and what that has to do with the licence model.

Maybe worth considering that being mass-market isn't always a good thing? Wordpress & Joomla for me are 90% wading through poor plugins, themes and bullshit marketing to find the small percent of things that are actually good. Focus trumps spray & pray every time in my world.

marcusquinn

Very much looking forward to seeing how you develop the multi-host features for 6.0.

If I may suggest for consideration in that it would be very useful to be able to move an entire domain with all it's configurations and apps from one Cloudron to another with a button, confirmation and function that went through the processes. I image it would need to pause all services on that domain during the transition to ensure data is frozen but it could be a scheduled maintenance or just a staging Cloudron to live Cloudron launch process.

So we can set everything up on one Cloudron instance, and them move the whole thing to another separate and dedicated one.

Might be a big ask - but though it worth bearing in mind in your designs and planning.

marcusquinn

Be handy to see who hasn't accepted their invite email yet (with a resend invite button) and who's not logged in for a while.

Bonus points for a login log to review user engagement with the platform.

marcusquinn

Sure, in the meantime, knowing how business can stretch developers thin - let's help them with the PR around the interweb as more subscribers equals more funds to recruit

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2877/upvote-and-review-cloudron-on-all-the-alternative-to-type-websites-to-help-grow-the-team-and-community

marcusquinn

Nice. We get the same speeds upstream too. Every home has fibre to the router, so there's no copper last-mile.

Don't know why the UK didn't do that, probably cost but they will have to eventually. 5G can't match the ping times so can't see that as making much difference to the average browsing experience.

I know New Jersey and the US well too from work travels, explain the Jersey thing a lot when over that side

This is a good video, we have about 30 beach cafes and bars dotted around the coast - and yes, a geographically, digitally and fiscally it's natural fortress - this one of my favourite spots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6arC1Xtyqmk
(1m 17s Ad for Jersey)

Digital industry there is getting a lot of investment, and I try to champion the open-source cause and promote that by example.

Binance recently relocated to Jersey, I'm sure there will be others.

marcusquinn

I think this will be valuable to everyone. I'm a big fan of Integromat - but this looks like the best FOSS self-hosted equivalent.

Discussing with @murgero and will pledge some mullah.

Please, if you can't package apps, I'm certain you'll find value from having this in your toolbox.

What I'm sponsoring is no way enough to match a respectable rate for developers - but it's something.

Please send also him something via Paypal if you can, in appreciation and we'll do all we can to get some more of these killer apps live sooner for everyone to flex with.

marcusquinn

@Nicolas and anyone with a Wordpress issue and not access to developers I recommend the following steps:

If your site doesn't change much, it is usually a good idea to roll back to the oldest backup you have that is still what you want. You might be lucky and get to a point before any breach.
Change all Admin user passwords immediately. Might not be that but it's a process of elimination. Most hacks I've seen keep getting back in because they have a compromised Admin account one way or another.
Run updates for core and all plugins.
Deactivate and remove all plugins that don't update.
Run the free version of this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/gotmls/
Run the free version of this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cerber/
Run the free version of this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/
This plugin is old but still works for evaluating any plugin you are unsure of the code quality for, maybe run on a clone just to be safe: https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-inspector/

GOTMLS should catch anything and is deep and fast to do and see results, it's the one I've seen most managed Wordpress vendors use and recommend as 1st thing to do when contacting them. It used to scan the core for free but honestly, it's worth the donation for the quality, speed and updates they offer.

Cerber & Wordfence I've had mixed results and speed with but they can't do any harm, and are safe to leave installed and running on the free versions.

marcusquinn

"Apprise allows you to send a notification to almost all of the most popular notification services available to us today such as: Telegram, Discord, Slack, Amazon SNS, Gotify, etc.

One notification library to rule them all.
A common and intuitive notification syntax.
Supports the handling of images and attachments (to the notification services that will accept them).

System owners who wish to provide a notification service no longer need to research each and every new one as they appear. They just need to include this one library and then they can immediately gain access to almost all of the notifications services available to us today.

System Administrators who wish to send a notification from a scheduled task or from the command line also no longer need to find the right tool for the job. Everything is already wrapped and supported within the apprise script that ships with this product."*

https://github.com/caronc/apprise

Maybe useful for Cloudron Notification options beyond the browser?

marcusquinn

I setup a separate licensed Cloudron dev box for app packaging with my team and wondered if it's useful to anyone else to have access to it for app packaging?

It's at https://my.dev.brandlight.org

There's only the two Prometheus apps on it at the moment, that @eriktad packaged, but we have more planned, and I'm sure many know my long Wishlist by now.

Trusted @appdev only, of course.

There's nothing of particular value on there, other than apps we'll be packaging, prior to sharing upstream for hopeful inclusion in the App Store.

So it's just a resource I'm happy to share if it helps anyone with similar aims or you just want to collaborate on app packaging.

marcusquinn

Everyone contributing in the forums, codebase and apps are heroes!

I wish I could get more involved on that side but the next best I can do is keep telling every developer I work with and know online about it to try it, and get you more developer users — because I think we all can see the value in both the platform and this community.

I shudder to think of doing all that Cloudron does any other way now, and have been through pretty much every way of doing Sys Admin in 20+ years of tech.

marcusquinn

I'm determined to build a business model on what you're all doing with Cloudron now.

I'm thinking al-la-carte menu-pricing for managed app hosting and services.

One of the hardest things for us all to do is cost and price these things, which makes it the best opportunity IMHO.

I'm thinking along the lines of a price for setups and then for monthly maintenance support. Kinda like a Sys Admins & Developers union.

Of course people can always do more for less - but I'm working on the costing and pricing aspect of this as a way for everyone to have a rate-card you can use for reference, with accommodation for discounting and affiliate sales commissions if you so desired.

I'm thinking of a hybrid model, where Cloudroners can offer both the setup and management of the Cloudron Apps where people want the community versions, and rates for the setup and monitoring of their respective enterprise author hosted solutions so we are equally contributing back to those app developers in bringing them enterprise customers where appropriate too.

I feel like all this should have been done 20 years ago and Sys Admin been a professional rate expectation like any other profession - but only Microsoft seem to have cracked that, at great cost to freedoms.

So, thanks to @girish and @nebulon 's vision, I can see a bright and fun future with you all, and doing all I can for the presentation side of things for your esteemed review in the next days and weeks.

marcusquinn

@Shai yup, you have to change your post to be a Question, then tick "Solved". No permissions necessary to do that.

marcusquinn

I think this would be a luxury/business/pro feature.

Can we consider a way to have 2 x Cloudrons:

One would be the live and active server.

The second would be the destination for backups but directly cloning to a second instance as a hot-swap.

The use case would be faster recover from a total server failure or some kind of provider issue.

It could be a second VPS with the same provider (I appreciate server snapshots are also an option there), or with another provider.

I appreciate this is not a high-availability setup, and there would be data-loss in the event of needing - but that's no different to a backup restore.

Switching to the hot-swap would just involve updating the DNS A record for the hot-swap, and then logging into it to trigger it to update all other DNS managed by the Cloudron.

It can come with all the usual warnings on data-loss from swapping, and not recommending swapping back after etc.

marcusquinn

@app-dev's https://forum.cloudron.io/groups/appdev

Add your Paypal/Bitcoin/Gumroad links to your profile to get some sponsoring tips

I personally can't pay for everything but happy to send a few dollars in thanks.

marcusquinn

Just a thought for the business-model side of open-source because as much as I love and promote open-source, I always look at what the business model is behind it. Any software choice is a long-term commitment and I want to know that progress is motivated and sustainable.

Partner programs / subscription levels. Odoo has a good example of this. The return on investment for the Partners being implementation referrals.

https://www.odoo.com/become-a-partner

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