Olivier Forget

This is the progress report for Dropserver for September 2025. The previous report is here. Bubblewrap woes Dropserver uses Bubblewrap as a second layer sandbox. bwrap uses Linux namespaces to create its sandbox, and as such things can sometimes get prickly. For some reason, on Debian 12 I can not get ds-host to start a sandbox with bwrap enabled when it is running from systemd. It works fine when I start it up manually, but as a systemd service, no go.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for August 2025. The previous report is here. This month I worked on getting an instance of ds-host running in my home. Now that it’s trivially easy to make an appspace a Tailscale node, running my instance away from the public internet is the way to go. But there are caveats! And new footguns! And countless little decisions I made while developing ds-host that are no longer helpful!

This is the progress report for Dropserver for June and July 2025. The previous report is here. In June I finally finished up the integration of Tailscale into Dropserver, then went on vacation. What remained of July was not terribly productive, but it was a good opportunity to think about where I should be going with this project. Tailscale Integration There were 21 commits in June. Lots of little things of course but some were the result of finally figuring out an effective UI for creating and managing a Tailscale node.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for May 2025. The previous report is here. Quick one this month because I was away on vacation for a good chunk of May. Tailscale Integration Tailscale integration is nearly done now. I’m knocking out items on my todo list. The main thing I did this month was to experiment again with the open source alternatives to Tailscale Headscale and Ionscale. I would really like for Dropserver to work with open alternatives to Tailscale, which is why I spent a decent amount of time trying both of them again.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for April 2025. The previous report is here. Tailscale Integration for the Admin Side of Dropserver Recapping where I was: I got Tailscale integration working pretty well for appspaces (an appspace is a running app in Dropserver, see here.) Meaning that you can access the apps that you host on Dropserver via tailnet node in addition to via the regular Internet. Now I want to give access to the admin side of ds-host via Tailscale.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for March 2025. The previous report is here. Dropserver.org Docs Pages and Modern CSS I spent some time at the beginning of the month making the Docs pages of Dropserver.org easier to use. In particular I wanted to have the navigation in the sidebar instead of a separate page, this makes casually browsing the docs far more user-friendly. But this was not just an effort to improve the docs pages.

This is the progress report from Dropserver for February 2025. The previous report is here. This month was extra-short thanks to a much-needed ski vacation, but I did manage to make some solid progress on integrating Tailscale into ds-host. Tailscale Users as Appspace Users After grinding on Vue templates, DB calls and everything in between, it’s now possible to assign multiple auth credentials to a single user. This means an appspace user can access the appspace via Tailscale, or via the public network or local network interchangeably.

This is the progress report for Dropserver for January 2025. While the previous report was a wrap up of 2024, this one is a look ahead for 2025. The Battle Between the Drive and The Grind A New Year’s celebration adds a new notch to a years-long project. A new year is a time to take stock of how far a project has come along, and what it still needs.

Instead of going over the month of December (not much happened), here is a quick recap for the year in countdown form: Four Releases I released four versions of Dropserver: 0.13.0: Install/update apps from URL. See January. 0.13.1 brought a few bug fixes and improvements. See March progress report. 0.13.2 Adds a proxy for outbound requests, and many small tweaks. See May update. 0.13.3 See September progress report. Three Main Areas of Work I worked primarily on three new things in 2024:

In our drive to take control of our web presence by self-hosting our services from home, it seems contradictory to depend on 3rd party services to make it all work. Companies like Mailgun, Tailscale, Cloudflare, Netlify, NextDNS, Linode, AWS, ngrok, and many more offer compelling solutions to the endless challenges of self-hosting. But does using them mean we are fooling ourselves about our independence from big tech? Here is how I think of things as I decide what to use in my own home, and what I integrate into Dropserver.