This machineEvery page

Maintenance

Maintenance opens on a sentence — what wants doing, whether the panel can be reached from outside — then rows in four groups: Keeping it up to date, Reaching it from outside, Backups and The machine. Each row opens a drawer.

Updates

This panel: upload a release (panel-<version>-linux-<arch>.tar.gz from the download page). It is checked, installed beside the running version, and the panel restarts into it. Then it waits to be kept: if the machine starts a second time without it being kept, the previous version comes back.

The About page — the version at the top of every page — does the same.

A panel that shares accounts with yours fetches a release once yours runs it and keeps it, and offers it: Install and Keep stay yours.

New versions by themselves

Once a day, each panel looks at the download site for a newer version. When there is one, it fetches it, checks it, and says on Home and here that it is ready to install; Install and Keep stay yours, as with a release you upload.

It believes only what was signed by the key panel's releases are built with: a list of versions, or a release, that is not exactly what was signed is refused, and the reason is shown here.

Each day switches the daily look off and on; Check now looks at once, even when it is off, and fetches a version you cleared before. Last looked says when it last did, and what it found.

Debian's updates

Each night, at a minute between 02:00 and 05:00, the machine installs Debian's own updates: security fixes and point releases for what is installed, never a new version of anything. It keeps your settings and restarts what an update fixed.

The panel never restarts the machine by itself. When an update needs it — a new kernel, say — Home and this row say so, and Restart is a button pressed twice. The page follows the machine through its restart and loads again when it is back.

Install now runs it at once; the switch turns it off.

Its name

A name in your own domain at Cloudflare — home.example.com — with a certificate from Let's Encrypt, so browsers trust it without a warning. You give the name, an email (optional), and a Cloudflare API token that may edit that zone's DNS. The token is tried before it is kept, and never shown again. No port is opened for it, and it renews by itself.

On a router, the name is answered at home with the router's address.

Relay

Joins a relay, so panels at different places reach each other, and — if you switch on From outside — a browser anywhere reaches this panel by its name. Give the panel its name first, then type the relay's join code here.

Kept out lists addresses the relay dropped for guessing, with Let it through.

Backups

Take a backup: an encrypted file of the settings, the accounts, the VPN's configuration and which modules are on. The passphrase is required, and can't be recovered: keep it somewhere safe.

Restore shows what it would change first, keeps a copy of how things are, and asks for a restart. Modules the backup had on are switched on, installed from the internet if they need packages. Then it waits to be kept, with Keep and Undo.

Restart

Restarts the panel, or, pressed twice, the whole machine.