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Whoa, at the end of the article there's an announcement about "WebThings Gateway for Wireless Routers". Is this the beginning of apps for routers? I've talked a

Whoa, at the end of the article there's an announcement about "WebThings Gateway for Wireless Routers". Is this the beginning of apps for routers? I've talked about the idea before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887403 I'm excited to hear more.

doctorpangloss 8y ago
Docker for NAS devices is the de facto App Store. The most compelling applications are for media consumption / piracy.
- flipper_c 8y ago
  I’ve been looking into this lately for mine. Definitely need to invest more time. What NAS are you running?
  - graton 8y ago
    I'm not who you asked but Synology is pretty nice. Runs Docker nicely and lots of applications available for it. Recommend an Intel CPU based vs the ARM based Synology NAS systems. I use it to run various software for my home network.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I second Synology. Runs my ArchiveTeam docker container, any docker container really without issue. Also accepts TimeMachine backups from my Macs and backs everything up to Backblaze B2.
    - tomjakubowski 8y ago
      Why do you recommend Intel over ARM?
      - gervase 8y ago
        I wouldn't say this is a universal "ARM vs Intel" claim, just a specific heuristic for this company's products. Synology's ARM line is generally underpowered compared to their Intel offerings, in terms of clock speed, memory capacity, and core count. They also tend to gate additional features (e.g. hardware-accelerated encryption) behind their Intel offerings. edit: We're mostly talking Atoms / Celerons here, so not exactly screaming performance either way.
      - kalleboo 8y ago
        Unless something has changed in the past year, Docker and Virtual Machines are only supported on their Intel devices and not the ARM ones. There are third-party package managers for the ARM devices but there are a lot of broken packages so I wouldn't recommend using it.
- skunkworker 8y ago
  I'm using Unraid for my NAS currently. It hosts pihole, a local nginx proxy, and a unifi controller in addition to other containers. I can also throw on some docker containers to build chromium and other large projects in their target environments.
  - vijaykodam 8y ago
    Your setup looks interesting. Would be great if you could write a blog about your setup.
flipper_c 8y ago
That was what I found most interesting too. But then I’m a hardware geek!
paavoova 8y ago
What exactly differentiates "apps" here from regular programs you can install on routers? If your router runs a hosted system such as Linux and isn't locked down (e.g. OpenWRT), you can install/compile for any existing program that supports the architecture and system. Installing tor as you in linked post is just "opkg install tor". A lot of packages have webgui frontends, too. Edit: I've read the article and Mozilla even mentions reskinning/basing off of OpenWRT. Which only puzzles me even more given you write "the beginning of apps for routers" as if OpenWRT/pfSense/etc doesn't exist.
- IgorPartola 8y ago
  When you do opkg install tor, opkg might very well install other services, libraries, executables, config files, caches, etc. If tor is not what you actually wanted or you want to remove it, you now have to worry about how to do that best. How often do you want to go messing with your router to try to straighten out exactly wtf the various pre and post install scripts did? The nice thing about containers is that when you want to remove one you just remove it.
  - paavoova 8y ago
    Yes, by design, it's a package manager. Rather than bundle dependencies such as libraries, they're pulled in system-wide and dynamically linked. This preserves both flash and memory space on embedded systems, which with consumer routers are fairly constrained. My router has 16MiB of flash and 128MiB of RAM, and that is more or less typical for consumer non-x86 routers. Likewise, uninstalling via a package manager handles orphaned dependencies automatically for you. > How often do you want to go messing with your router That's the thing when you're running what is essentially Linux (in the case of OpenWRT): it's not a router, it's an OS and you can manage just like you do any other OS. Your description of "apps" as containers seems to abstract away the OS level and leave you with just some frontend (which is probably running Linux/*BSD underneath) and no control.
    - IgorPartola 8y ago
      > Likewise, uninstalling via a package manager handles orphaned dependencies automatically for you. Yes, and fairies are real, and so is Santa. I wish things were this way, but the reality is that most package managers aren't 100% perfect when it comes to install/uninstall and cleaning up of stuff. opkg is especially bad at it. If you look at how it actually works, the core files of the package are handled by the package manager, which usually (though not always works). But most packages aren't just binary blobs to be moved around. Take something like mysql-server for example. Not only will it install the MySQL binaries, it will also create /var/lib/mysql for all the data, and a few cache dirs as well. It'll also add files to /etc/, /etc/defaults/ and so on. Oh, and after it is installed, it will start the mysqld process. When you try to uninstall this stuff, but default the /var/lib/mysql directory won't be removed. Who knows, you might want the data that's there. Oh and that config file? That's staying too. So if you uninstall and reinstall mysql-server because something went bad, you'll just get the same config and data. Is that what you really wanted? You can of course do something like `apt autoremove --purge mysql-server` and that'll mostly work, assuming that mysqld isn't frozen, at which point the pre-remove script fails to kill it and you suddenly are left with a system with an inconsistent state. Last I checked, opkg didn't even have a purge option. And it doesn't stop there. The pre/post install/uninstall scripts can do whatever they want, and if they error out, you again are left with a mess you will be cleaning up by hand. I have done this on many distros many times and it is always a mess. apt/dpkg are one of the better systems out there. The rest? They will make you want to nuke whatever device you are working on from orbit. I am not on the "containers for everything" bandwagon, but the idea that opkg is somehow comparable in this case is laughable.

doctorpangloss 8y ago

Docker for NAS devices is the de facto App Store. The most compelling applications are for media consumption / piracy.

flipper_c 8y ago
I’ve been looking into this lately for mine. Definitely need to invest more time. What NAS are you running?
- graton 8y ago
  I'm not who you asked but Synology is pretty nice. Runs Docker nicely and lots of applications available for it. Recommend an Intel CPU based vs the ARM based Synology NAS systems. I use it to run various software for my home network.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I second Synology. Runs my ArchiveTeam docker container, any docker container really without issue. Also accepts TimeMachine backups from my Macs and backs everything up to Backblaze B2.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    Why do you recommend Intel over ARM?
    - gervase 8y ago
      I wouldn't say this is a universal "ARM vs Intel" claim, just a specific heuristic for this company's products. Synology's ARM line is generally underpowered compared to their Intel offerings, in terms of clock speed, memory capacity, and core count. They also tend to gate additional features (e.g. hardware-accelerated encryption) behind their Intel offerings. edit: We're mostly talking Atoms / Celerons here, so not exactly screaming performance either way.
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      Unless something has changed in the past year, Docker and Virtual Machines are only supported on their Intel devices and not the ARM ones. There are third-party package managers for the ARM devices but there are a lot of broken packages so I wouldn't recommend using it.
skunkworker 8y ago
I'm using Unraid for my NAS currently. It hosts pihole, a local nginx proxy, and a unifi controller in addition to other containers. I can also throw on some docker containers to build chromium and other large projects in their target environments.
- vijaykodam 8y ago
  Your setup looks interesting. Would be great if you could write a blog about your setup.

flipper_c 8y ago

That was what I found most interesting too. But then I’m a hardware geek!

paavoova 8y ago

What exactly differentiates "apps" here from regular programs you can install on routers? If your router runs a hosted system such as Linux and isn't locked down (e.g. OpenWRT), you can install/compile for any existing program that supports the architecture and system. Installing tor as you in linked post is just "opkg install tor". A lot of packages have webgui frontends, too. Edit: I've read the article and Mozilla even mentions reskinning/basing off of OpenWRT. Which only puzzles me even more given you write "the beginning of apps for routers" as if OpenWRT/pfSense/etc doesn't exist.

IgorPartola 8y ago
When you do opkg install tor, opkg might very well install other services, libraries, executables, config files, caches, etc. If tor is not what you actually wanted or you want to remove it, you now have to worry about how to do that best. How often do you want to go messing with your router to try to straighten out exactly wtf the various pre and post install scripts did? The nice thing about containers is that when you want to remove one you just remove it.
- paavoova 8y ago
  Yes, by design, it's a package manager. Rather than bundle dependencies such as libraries, they're pulled in system-wide and dynamically linked. This preserves both flash and memory space on embedded systems, which with consumer routers are fairly constrained. My router has 16MiB of flash and 128MiB of RAM, and that is more or less typical for consumer non-x86 routers. Likewise, uninstalling via a package manager handles orphaned dependencies automatically for you. > How often do you want to go messing with your router That's the thing when you're running what is essentially Linux (in the case of OpenWRT): it's not a router, it's an OS and you can manage just like you do any other OS. Your description of "apps" as containers seems to abstract away the OS level and leave you with just some frontend (which is probably running Linux/*BSD underneath) and no control.
  - IgorPartola 8y ago
    > Likewise, uninstalling via a package manager handles orphaned dependencies automatically for you. Yes, and fairies are real, and so is Santa. I wish things were this way, but the reality is that most package managers aren't 100% perfect when it comes to install/uninstall and cleaning up of stuff. opkg is especially bad at it. If you look at how it actually works, the core files of the package are handled by the package manager, which usually (though not always works). But most packages aren't just binary blobs to be moved around. Take something like mysql-server for example. Not only will it install the MySQL binaries, it will also create /var/lib/mysql for all the data, and a few cache dirs as well. It'll also add files to /etc/, /etc/defaults/ and so on. Oh, and after it is installed, it will start the mysqld process. When you try to uninstall this stuff, but default the /var/lib/mysql directory won't be removed. Who knows, you might want the data that's there. Oh and that config file? That's staying too. So if you uninstall and reinstall mysql-server because something went bad, you'll just get the same config and data. Is that what you really wanted? You can of course do something like `apt autoremove --purge mysql-server` and that'll mostly work, assuming that mysqld isn't frozen, at which point the pre-remove script fails to kill it and you suddenly are left with a system with an inconsistent state. Last I checked, opkg didn't even have a purge option. And it doesn't stop there. The pre/post install/uninstall scripts can do whatever they want, and if they error out, you again are left with a mess you will be cleaning up by hand. I have done this on many distros many times and it is always a mess. apt/dpkg are one of the better systems out there. The rest? They will make you want to nuke whatever device you are working on from orbit. I am not on the "containers for everything" bandwagon, but the idea that opkg is somehow comparable in this case is laughable.