crschnick @ crschnick @sh.itjust.works

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21

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107

Joined

2 yr. ago

Nope, an application like this can't work as a flatpak as the sandbox prevents almost all shell functionality and makes the application unusable. Yes, the AppImages are basically the best solution for immutable operating systems.

I think in the end you still have to exercise some trust. There are things like audits, but these are costly and not an option in the current stage. Maybe in the future. Best I can do is to provide transparency by open-sourcing large parts of the codebase and providing detailed security information like https://docs.xpipe.io/reference/security.

As someone who sometimes sells to the german public sector, it is true that they would prefer a good open source solution if it was available. But me being a german vendor makes up for it, as they still prefer this a lot more over any US-based vendors.

In general about the key handling, XPipe doesn't read any kind of keys itself, it only forwards them to the local OpenSSH client. It is essentially a wrapper around in existing ssh client, and doesn't implement anything related to key handling itself.

I think if you have a specialized tools with openstack, XPipe probably can't compete with that in that area. But it can make your life easier in a lot of other areas and common tasks when it comes to accessing many servers.

About the FOSS requirement, I know that this is a dealbreaker for some. That is a tradeoff when going the commercial route

Right now, you have to set the user separately. But I will think about fixing this for next release, there already is a way to configure a default identity for new connections, but it does not apply to teleport yet

Yes, the community edition doesn't have any limitation.

For paid plans, it's relative to the average usage and activations across all licenses. E.g. if you, as an enterprise, purchase licenses for 5 users, but have a usage like other customers with 20 users, I might inquire about how you are using it. If it is a special case where you install and use it on many servers and VMs in parallel, this can be taken into account and the limits can be adapted. But in general, the license limits are permissive and do not interfere with your usage.

So I worked on this over the last couple of days and fixed several performance issues in the latest 15.4 release, especially when it comes to handling many added connections like in your case. Feel free to try it again, it should handle better now.

So I worked on this over the last couple of days and fixed several performance issues in the latest 15.4 release, especially when it comes to handling many added connections. Feel free to try it again, it should handle better now.

So I worked on the performance over the last couple of days. There were some regressions that I discovered. This should be fixed now in the latest 15.4 release.

I think it's mainly bad optimization on my part. I will work on that for the next release as best as I can. So hopefully I can fix your issues somewhat until then

Thanks for the info, I see the issue with that many host entries. I will fix that for the next release

The only possibility I see here is that this is a Windows 10 system with an older SSHD if mobaxterm doesn't work anymore as there were some changes on which SSHD executable XPipe will use for mobaxterm.

About the X11, I am not aware of any changes that could change that behaviour. If no parent connection of the LXC container has that explicitly enabled, it shouldn't use that.

For both issues, feel free to post on GitHub and Discord and I can help troubleshoot this

You can go to Settings -> Troubleshoot and either take a look at the log files or launch it in debug mode. If you find anything, feel free to post on GitHub or Discord

When you say slow, what part do you refer to? I am always looking to improve on the performance front

I am a bit confused by the feedback on the performance here. Now the performance wasn't that great previously, but that should have been fixed over time, especially in the latest updates.

Maybe I am missing something when testing. So if you want, feel free to elaborate on where the performance issues occur, I can look into that.

What system did you try it on? I can look into it

Alright, feel free to let me know how it compares to your other tools that you use. That is always a valuable insight for me

Yes, you can use any local editor to edit your remote files

Alright, thanks for your insights from an outsider. It is always a difficult task to accurately judge your own projects if you're intimately familiar with it. So I will see what I can do about the things you mentioned

Alright, I see your points.

Now that you have spent a lot of time discussing it, even looking at the code, one thing that would be valuable for me would be how accurate your expectations are based on what you read here compared to the actual app. If it is pretty much as expected, then I guess at least my summaries are accurate. If it's not, then I can still do a better job at that part. Fundamentally changing the project itself is a little bit too late, but at least the communication can be changed on why people could use it. And I'm not trying to gain a new user here as it's probably not for you, but still would be interesting to me. You can give it five minutes and use the .tar.gz or the .appimage if you don't want to install anything.

Thanks for taking your time to write this.

I think the main point I'm trying to figure out here is whether this is a communications issue, i.e. how I describe it is not optimal or whether this is a fundamental project issue. Because I think I have a clear vision and target audience, I am part of that audience myself. The thing is, there isn't one standout feature. The value comes from the combination and integrations of multiple features that work together and allow for a smooth use experience. I can say it has support for SSH, docker, kubernetes, hypervisors, and more but all of that on an individual layer isn't that unique, it's the combination that you can use all of them together. But this is difficult to put into words, trying it out for yourself for a few minute usually yields better results.

About the shell commands, that is one of the standout features about it, so it's on purpose. I know this approach is more difficult and error prone than doing some kind of native library stuff, but it also allows me to run the same commands in remote shells on remote systems.