alt Hacker Newsi'm trying to understand how outer shell works here. on the website you give the following as your motivation:
> Apps like Jupyter and Tensorboard are not typically visible to standard web browsers if they’re running on remote servers, because it would be terribly unsafe to let the whole internet touch this app. Instead, they run on a local port on the server, which your computer can’t access directly.
> Classically, to get access to these, you had to open a new terminal and run:
> ssh -L 24601:localhost:8889 [email protected] &
> ssh -L 24602:localhost:6006 [email protected] &
is this true? isn't the normal thing just to do this ssh forwarding for prototyping, then for deployment, you set up a website like myjupyternotebook.com, and then set up auth so that others can't access it. HTTP basic auth is not too much work.
if you want SSH, not HTTP, to be what's publicly exposed, there's other options too, like putting it behind a VPN or tunnel.
all this to say, outer loop is super cool, but I don't get it. I must be missing something about why you built it, so could you help me understand?
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I guess it saves you the hassle of dealing with reverse proxies and TLS certs if your use case is "userbase is 1 person and it is me, and i only access services from a desktop os"
Btw, if you find yourself sending a lot of ports over ssh, you can also consider the option of having ssh start a socks5 proxy
ssh -D 4711 -q -C -N user@host
sets localhost:4711 up as a socks5 proxy you can tell your browser to use
...
A wireguard VPN is better of course; among other things because ssh is multiplexing over a single TCP connection and will encounter head of line blocking (where one dropped packet blocks all forwarded traffic until resent)
I think there are different clusters of people who use servers, SSH, etc.
I'm closer to the cluster that uses them for deep learning experiments, GPU kernel optimization, robot development (a robot is just a server that moves!)... use cases where you are explicitly using a remote computer.
For this cluster of people, I think this tool feels more intuitive than the flow you suggest. But maybe I'm projecting!
And, to me, this just feels like one of the fundamental things that could exist; it's like a graphical operating system, but remote-first.