Ondevice SSH

Dev tools

remote access ssh

SHOW HN2017

Ondevice SSH

Terminal emulator for devices without public IP address

ondevice.io

#ssh#reverse tunnel#remote access#no public ip

152points
89comments
#248of 2,242 in 2017
Top 12%of 2017 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

4 positive, 14 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 8 critical, out of 27 comments about the project. Thread score -0.12.

Idea: 2 for, 4 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 2 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for accessing customer embedded devices

    From 2 comments
    • At a previous job we had the same setup to SSH to our customer's embedded devices for diagnostics. Incredibly useful. I've been playing with the idea to provide this as a service…
      rollulus on HN
    • Quite neat, and solves a big problem I had (devices at customers sites). However for me it would be very hard to trust you (security and availability wise). I opted (some months…
      Faaak on HN

Objections

  • Hard to trust a cloud service with access to devices

    From 2 comments
    • Quite neat, and solves a big problem I had (devices at customers sites). However for me it would be very hard to trust you (security and availability wise). I opted (some months…
      Faaak on HN
    • Yes, this needs a self-hosted alternative to their cloud be viable in my book.
      tjoff on HN
  • Standard SSH reverse tunnels or a VPN already do this

    From 3 comments
    • Very neat, but SSH already has capabilities built-in to handle this scenario without harming security or increasing complexity. To add to irq-1's excellent response, another…
      jamiesonbecker on HN
    • A "private VPN server" is meaningless, could be IPsec or PPTP or OpenVPN or SSH or ... If you're already using SSH you can use it to forward ports. You can SSH into that SSH…
      Fnoord on HN
    • You don't seem to mention pricing at all beyond the "5 devices and 5Gb/mo free". That would be useful to what I expect your main audience to be (people for whom the other obvious…
      dspillett on HN
  • curl piped to sudo bash install is a security risk

    From 1 comment
    • Using curl piped to sudo bash can be a security risk, as used to install the demo. # curl -sSL https://get.ondevice.io/|sudo - bash A fairly balanced post and mitigation options:…
      neurotech1 on HN

Requests

  • Self-hosted option

    From 1 comment
    • Yes, this needs a self-hosted alternative to their cloud be viable in my book.
      tjoff on HN
  • Clearer pricing

    From 1 comment
    • You don't seem to mention pricing at all beyond the "5 devices and 5Gb/mo free". That would be useful to what I expect your main audience to be (people for whom the other obvious…
      dspillett on HN
  • Explain how it works relative to plain ssh

    From 1 comment
    • Looks really neat, however it works make sense to explain how it works to be exactly like ssh :)
      kevinsimper on HN

Questions

  • How does it differ from ngrok?

    From 1 comment
  • Could it use ProxyCommand so ssh works unchanged?

    From 1 comment
    • Instead of wrapping SSH calls with an additional command, would it be possible to use a ProxyCommand? This way, anything working with "ssh" would work out of the box.
      vbernat on HN

Alternatives named

  • ZeroTier

    From 2 comments
    • Check out ZeroTier [1]. You can place all your devices on a virtual LAN. Not affiliated. [1] https://zerotier.com/
      i_have_to_speak on HN
    • Why not use zerotier and have a super simple vlan?
      jbverschoor on HN
  • Tor hidden services

    From 2 comments
    • a while ago I found out that you could do this by running a tor hidden service on the device. If I needed it, I think I'd rather use that, or a reverse tunnel than going through…
      fimdomeio on HN
    • via tor: https://nurdletech.com/linux-notes/ssh/hidden-service.html via reverse proxy: `ssh -NT -R 1234:localhost:22 youruser@yourmachine.com` Now if you connect to…
      fimdomeio on HN
  • OpenVPN

    From 2 comments
    • OpenVPN listening TCP and UDP on various ports. I was always able to get through.
      Faaak on HN
    • I wonder why openvpn comes up so often, and e.g. tinc and zerotier, much less often.
      nine_k on HN
  • Gravitational Teleport

    From 2 comments
    • Seems very much like Gravitational Teleport - https://gravitational.com/teleport/
      amscotti on HN
    • Gravitational Teleport is frequently used for SSH behind the firewall as well, but also tackles many other aspects of SSH for organizations. It's Open source!…
      kevin_nisbet on HN
  • ngrok

    From 2 comments
    • I wonder what is the difference with ngrok, if any?
      crubier on HN
    • I used to go via the ngrok way, but thanks for a better-targeted solution. BTW, just curious is there any other alternative apart from this ?
      mfrw on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/15785333)