Sandstorm now supports RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Arch, and more | Hacker News Reader

Sandstorm now supports RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Arch, and more

sandstorm.io

139 pointshypertexthero28 comments

I use sandstorm right now. It's be absolutely great so far. The only downside is some of the apps either aren't packaged the best or aren't truly designed for Sandstorm, but other than that the system itself is rock solid. I hope the team will start helping out projects and developers get apps out faster and more reliably.

I am wondering if I should start arguing for a voluntary fund to be distributed to open source projects that runs on sandbox.

Maybe that could encourage even more projects to release sandstorm packages.

In my experience they're doing quite a bit to help people port apps. Every time I've posted to the mailing list or hopped on IRC, someone has been there to help out. The nature of sandstorm's security controls means that any given app is either going to be really easy to port or quite difficult. Apps that don't make backend network requests tend to be pretty easy.

One challenge I've run into is that for an app to truly fit into sandstorm it needs its authentication and user management removed. This usually isn't too hard (just ripping out code) but it can be hard to upstream changes in a way that doesn't break stuff, then as the sandstorm maintainer you have to contend with merge conflicts as the upstream app releases new versions.

Yea I've noticed that as well. There are also minor issues with file needing to be used for it to work requiring developers to use their entire app every deploy.

I was going to start developing my future projects (opensource and private) with this idea in mind so I don't have to worry about trying to make it work.

Oh yes I absolutely agree. The reason one of my apps is available on the sandstorm store is because @paulproteus pushed me so hard to push it to their platform. Got a ton of help, and they even made an icon for the application.

Really helpful team of people

Sandstorm really is awesome. Wish the process of building apps to work for it was happening even faster!

Does anyone have a good spreadsheet app with near-feature equivlance to google sheets (filters, conditional formats, etc). Tried EtherCalc and it's ok for issue lists, but a bit limited for status reporting.

Cool. This was one of the blockers for deploying Sandstorm for me.

Why don't you run a more modern Distributed / Kernel?

Some container/vm hosts can't do that.

On (apparently) the original announcement [0], we're told that:

> Sandstorm for Work is priced at $15/user/month ...

But if I click the "And more..." link just above that, I'm taken to another page [1] that says:

> Priced at $10/user/month

I assume they dropped the price at some point and $10/user/month is the correct (current) pricing?

[0]: https://sandstorm.io/news/2016-04-06-sandstorm-for-work [1]: https://sandstorm.io/business

Yes: https://sandstorm.io/news/2016-08-31-sandstorm-for-work-read...

Pricing is hard. :/

PS. The current pricing is $5/user/month if you pay for a year upfront!

I run a home Arch server and wanted to install Sandstorm on it a couple of weeks ago to use GitLab, Etherpad etc. but ended up on a VPS because it wasn't supported.

Now it is!

Thanks a lot for the work, sandstorm.io team!

Does it still require a wildcard TLS cert if you want to use over https?

Yes, though if you're just playing around with it, their sandcats.io service will provision you one automatically for free.

This is big news. There are many VPSs where I couldn't even try Sandstorm (even in in Debian/Ubuntu) because of that requirement.

Like the licenses.

With essential features such as centralised login (LDAP, AD, etc) as proprietary plugins.

Essential in non-personal setups where paying just reasonable to me.

Rather, essential in any setup with more than one user.

The standard version supports e-mail, Google, and Github login with any number of users.

Supports cloud users... but doesn't support LDAP.

Sigh.

The paid version supports LDAP.

The centralized login is part of Sandstorm for Work, which is also open source:

"The code for Sandstorm for Work is maintained in the Sandstorm open source project, under the Apache License 2.0. Feel free to read the code in GitHub." [0]

And:

"Is it Open Source? Yes! Sandstorm for Work features are part of the same codebase as the rest of Sandstorm and under the same Apache 2.0 license. However, in order to unlock Sandstorm for Work features, we ask that you buy a “feature key” from us. So how does that work? Can’t anyone just remove the feature key check? In fact, yes, you can. However, if you did that, you would not be able to take advantage of our automatic updater, which ensures that your server is updated to the latest version within 24 hours of any release with no effort on your part. Automatic updates are important to keep your server secure and to make sure you can always run the latest apps." [1]

P.S. Just a happy Sandstorm user here.

0: https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/for-work/#...

1: https://sandstorm.io/news/2016-04-06-sandstorm-for-work

WTF is sandstorm?

You could click the logo in the top left and find out.

https://sandstorm.io/

I was asking myself that a moment ago and had to navigate around a bit to get a better idea.

Sandstorm is a self-hostable web productivity suite. It is also a marketplace for components that fit within the suite. It has strong ideas about security and the post's linked page is about how they are making that security model available to versions of Linux that don't support some of the Linux kernel's newer features.

Also, it uses Linux containerisation features, like Docker does. But is quite different to Docker:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sandstorm-dev/_I7cHARM...

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