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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

I love this idea, and the pricing seems spot-on.

However, it's not obvious if this is Ruby-only or not? I don't use Ruby, so that's kind of a big deal.

I was going to say that the day pass pricing is right on but if it was me, I'd want to do price testing on the monthly pass because it seems to inexpensive.

I'd also consider a "Enterprise plan" which is monthly plan with possibly some restrictions based on IP or with password protection etc.

I had the same question as we do mostly PHP; I'm guessing it just uses Ruby as the host software.

I installed the Gem and was able to acquire a URL but kept getting an error:

An error has occurred: {"stack":"Error: socket hang up\n at Socket.<anonymous> (http.js:1271:45)\n at Socket.emit (events.js:64:17)\n at Array.0 (net.js:825:12)\n at EventEmitter._tickCallback (node.js:126:26)","message":"socket hang up"}

Hey crikli, could you send an email to support@showoff.io with any extra details that seem relevant? We'd love to track this down!

You need to have some server listening on your local machine at whatever port you are creating the tunnel for.

If you just wanted to test it out you could start something like "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" and then "show 8000", which will serve files from your local machine at your showoff url (I might recommend running the server in an empty directory).

Right you are; I did that and was able to see a bunch of stuff I'd not want to share over the web. :)

Sheesh. Ruby runs over 3000, if you're not running the ruby server on 3000 there's not going to be anything listening.

Facepalm.

A pedantic correction: Rails runs its server on port 3000 by default; Ruby is the language Rails was written in.

Instead of giving this error, there needs to be a message that explicitly tells the user what's wrong. Something like:

"Woops, you said your server was running on port <port>. Is it?"

you have to leave the 'show' program running or you get that error - leave your terminal window open, don't control-c out of it once you've started it, and it will work fine. I had the same issue :)

We wrote the showoff client in Ruby. It's a light wrapper around SSH that helps manage accounts, SSH keys, &c.

Since Showoff is basically a fancy SSH tunnel, it should work with any kind of webserver. If there's enough interest, we'll probably bundle up client software in ways that don't depend on `gem install`.

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