Skip to content
BranchesTags

Repository files navigation

InfoIn Server

Your Linux server. Fully visible. Fully in control.

A self-hosted, open-source server monitoring and administration dashboard built specifically for Linux bare-metal machines. InfoIn Server reads metrics directly from the kernel — /proc, /sys, /dev — streams them live over WebSocket, authenticates via your OS's own PAM system, and gives you a modern web interface to manage every aspect of your server without SSH gymnastics.

No agents. No telemetry. No cloud dependency. Just your server, talking to you.

Philosophy

InfoIn Server was built around three foundational ideas drawn from computer science literature:

1. The Unix Philosophy — Do one thing, and do it well

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together." — Doug McIlroy, as quoted in Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming (2003)

Each component in InfoIn Server is a focused module. The backend does not try to be an ORM, a scheduler framework, or a plugin platform. It reads the kernel, executes trusted system commands, and streams data — nothing more. The frontend renders that data beautifully.

2. Cognitive Load Theory — Complexity kills usability

"Working memory has a limited capacity... instruction should be designed to reduce unnecessary cognitive load." — John Sweller, Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning, Cognitive Science (1988)

Every UI decision in InfoIn Server minimizes the mental overhead of server administration. Status is always visible. Actions are always contextual. You should never need to read a manual to restart a service or ban an IP.

3. The Pragmatic Programmer — Own your tools

"Use a single editor well... The editor should be an extension of your hand." — Andrew Hunt & David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2019)

A monitoring dashboard is a tool. If you cannot extend it, trust it, or understand it, it owns you. InfoIn Server is fully self-hosted, fully readable, and fully yours. The source code is the documentation.

Features

Real-time Monitoring

  • Live System Metrics via WebSocket — CPU, RAM, Disk, and Network streamed from /proc every 3 seconds with automatic reconnection
  • Historical Performance Charts — CPU, RAM, Disk, and Network (Mbps) recorded every 5 minutes to SQLite, displayed as interactive line charts with time range filters (1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, 24h)
  • System Info Panel — Hostname, OS name with distro icon, kernel version, uptime, logged-in user

System Administration

  • Systemd Services — Full UI to list, start, stop, restart, enable, and disable background daemons
  • Process Manager — Live top-process list (CPU/RAM sorted), search by name or PID, force-kill any process
  • OS Package Updates — Detect upgradable packages via apt or checkupdates (pacman), apply upgrades with a live streaming terminal via WebSocket
  • Cron Job Manager — Read, add, edit, and delete /etc/crontab jobs via a structured form UI
  • System Reboot & Update — One-click server reboot and dashboard self-update via git pull + cargo build

User & Group Management

  • Multi-user Dashboard Session — Switch between different sudo users securely without logging out. Sessions are stored and handled gracefully. Only non-root users with sudo or wheel privileges are allowed
  • Linux User Management — Create users (useradd), change passwords securely, assign to groups, delete users (with optional home dir removal)
  • Group Management — Create and delete Linux groups, view all group members
  • SSH Key Manager — Per-user management of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys: list, add (with format validation for ssh-rsa/ed25519/ecdsa), and delete individual keys

Advanced File Management (File Explorer 2.0)

  • Full Filesystem Access — Browse the entire Linux filesystem from /. Write operations are strictly restricted to your $HOME folder and connected USB drives. System folders (like /etc, /var) are read-only
  • Disk & Removable Media Sidebar — Auto-detect internal disks and USB/SD Cards. View usage bars, browse partitions, and Mount/Eject removable media via the UI
  • 3 View Modes — List, Grid (with image thumbnails), and Compact mode — persisted per browser session
  • Recursive Search — Find files across subdirectories via find command, up to 8 levels deep
  • File Actions — Rename, Move, Copy (even across disks), Delete, Compress to ZIP (with optional password), Extract ZIP, visual Checkbox UI for chmod
  • File Info Modal — Size, permissions (octal + symbolic), owner (user:group), last modified time
  • Text Editor — Built-in browser editor for reading and writing text files
  • Upload & URL Fetch — Multi-file upload via drag-and-drop, or download files from the internet directly to the server via wget

Network & Security

  • Network Interfaces — Active interfaces, MAC addresses, IP networks, default gateway, and visual RX/TX usage bars
  • Listening Ports — Clean list of all locally listening ports with Scope Badges (🌍 Public / 🔒 Local), protocol, clean process name, and force-kill action
  • Deep Port Scan — On-demand async port scanning via nmap with structured result tables, highlighting dangerous open ports
  • UFW Firewall — View status, toggle enable/disable with one click, manage allow/deny rules
  • Internet Speedtest — On-demand network speed testing via speedtest-cli with a 5-history FIFO retention and large summary UI
  • Real-time Latency Indicator — Live ping (e.g., 🟢 12ms) from the browser to the backend server, displayed directly in the navbar

Intrusion Prevention (Fail2Ban Command Center)

  • Status Dashboard — Installed jails, banned IP count per jail, auto-detect active/inactive
  • Manual Ban & Unban — Ban or unban any IP from any jail using a clean inline form
  • Jail Configuration — Visual editor for /etc/fail2ban/jail.local with:
    • Quick Service Templates: SSH, Nginx, Postfix, Apache, WordPress, etc.
    • Filter dropdown automatically populated from /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/
    • Field tooltips explaining maxretry, bantime, findtime
    • Live preview of the generated INI config block
    • Delete jail button
  • Live Activity Log — Tail /var/log/fail2ban.log in real-time to watch bans happen live
  • One-click Install — Install fail2ban via apt or pacman directly from the dashboard

Container & Compose Management

  • Multi-runtime Support — Automatically detects Docker or Podman on the host
  • Container Management — List, start, stop, remove containers; inspect details; view logs
  • Docker/Podman Compose — Deploy new projects via YAML editor, view per-service status, stop/restart/rebuild/scale/delete projects, edit YAML inline

Cloudflare Tunnel Management

  • Command Center UI — Two-panel layout: Control panel (left) + Tab-based content (right)
  • Full Setup Wizard — Step-by-step wizard: Install → Authorize (capture URL) → Create Tunnel
  • Control Panel — Tunnel name, animated running status, version, UUID, quick stats (routes, active DNS, uptime), service start/stop/restart, and danger-zone delete
  • Routes Tab — Unified table for Ingress + CNAME status, inline actions, add route form
  • Health Tab — Per-domain HTTP probe with detailed E2E diagnostics: HEALTHY, ERR_502 (local service down), ERR_1033 (tunnel daemon down), NXDOMAIN (DNS missing)
  • Live Logs Tab — WebSocket stream from journalctl -f for cloudflared, with filter (all/err/wrn), pause/resume, clear
  • CNAME DNS Manager — Register DNS CNAME to Cloudflare, tracked via local SQLite for instant status feedback

System Logs & Audit

  • System Journal — journalctl viewer with filter modes: All, Auth (SSH), Kernel (dmesg). Live auto-refresh with pause/resume
  • Dashboard Audit Log — Every action taken through the dashboard (firewall changes, user creation, tunnel deletion, etc.) is recorded to SQLite with level (INFO / WARNING / CRITICAL), action name, and detail
  • Bash History Viewer — Read /root/.bash_history and user bash histories in a terminal-style viewer

Developer Tools

  • Multi-session Root Terminal — Native PTY shell via WebSocket (xterm.js). Multiple independent browser tabs each get their own /bin/bash shell
  • OS Update Terminal — Live streaming terminal for apt upgrade or pacman -Syu via WebSocket

Security Architecture

  • PAM Authentication — Login uses the real Linux OS credentials, verified via libpam against /etc/shadow. No separate user database needed
  • JWT Session Tokens — After successful login, a signed JWT is issued. All API endpoints are protected. WebSocket connections use ?token= query parameter
  • Auto-Logout on Auth Failure — If a sudo command fails due to an expired or invalid session, the API returns a recognizable error string, the frontend detects it, clears the token, and redirects to the login screen automatically
  • Write Permission Zones — The file manager enforces a strict zone model: write is only allowed inside your $HOME and mounted removable drives. All other filesystem paths are read-only
  • Sudo Injection — Commands requiring elevated privileges securely inject the authenticated password via sudo -S stdin without pipe buffering issues. The password is never stored on disk, never logged, and never sent back to the frontend

Tech Stack

Layer Technology
Backend Rust, Axum 0.8, Tokio (async runtime), SQLx + SQLite, portable-pty
Metrics Source /proc/stat, /proc/meminfo, /proc/uptime, /proc/mounts, /proc/net/dev, statvfs(), sysinfo crate
Auth & Security PAM (libpam), JWT (jsonwebtoken), bcrypt-compatible
Frontend Vue 3 (Composition API), Vite 8, Tailwind CSS v4, Chart.js, xterm.js, Lucide Icons
WebSocket Axum WS + Tokio for 4 real-time channels: metrics, terminal PTY, Cloudflare logs, OS upgrade
Database SQLite (via SQLx async) — 5 tables: metrics history, speedtest history, port scan jobs, activity log, CNAME status

OS Support

InfoIn Server reads directly from Linux kernel interfaces. It is a Linux-first application.

Distro Status
Arch Linux / CachyOS / Manjaro ✅ Fully Supported & Tested
Ubuntu / Debian ✅ Fully Supported & Tested
Fedora / Rocky / AlmaLinux ⚠️ Should work, not officially tested
NixOS / Alpine ⚠️ Experimental
Windows (native) / macOS ❌ Unsupported

Prerequisites

Backend Host (bare-metal Linux)

Arch Linux / CachyOS / Manjaro

# Build tools & core
sudo pacman -S rustup base-devel clang pam zip unzip

# Set up Rust toolchain
rustup default stable

# Runtime tools used by the dashboard
sudo pacman -S iproute2 nmap wget ufw speedtest-cli fail2ban
sudo pacman -S podman docker-compose   # For container management (optional)

Pacman note: fail2ban may require pacman-contrib for the checkupdates command used in OS update checks.

Ubuntu / Debian

# Build dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y \
  curl build-essential pkg-config \
  libclang-dev libpam0g-dev \
  zip unzip

# Install Rust
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

# Runtime tools used by the dashboard
sudo apt install -y \
  iproute2 nmap wget ufw speedtest-cli \
  fail2ban

# For OS package update feature (Debian/Ubuntu)
# apt-get is already available — no extra install needed

# For container management (optional)
sudo apt install -y podman docker-compose

Frontend Host

The frontend is a standard Vue 3 SPA built with Vite. It can be served from the same machine or any static file host.

# Node.js (required for building)
node --version   # Required: v22.18.0 or >= v24.12.0

# Package manager
npm --version

Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the project root before running the backend:

# Port the backend HTTP server listens on
PORT=8080

# Root directory for the file manager.
# $HOME is dynamically expanded to the home directory of the ACTIVE user session in the dashboard.
FILE_ROOT=$HOME

# Path to the SQLite database file
DB_PATH=sqlite:./data.db

# Secret key for signing JWT tokens. Change this to a strong random string in production.
# Generate one: openssl rand -hex 32
JWT_SECRET=change-this-to-a-strong-random-secret

Database Schema

InfoIn Server uses a single SQLite database file (data.db) with 5 tables, created automatically at startup.

Table Purpose
system_metrics_history CPU, RAM, Disk, Network stats recorded every 5 minutes
speedtest_history Results of internet speed tests (download/upload Mbps, ping). Keeps a maximum of 5 recent tests (FIFO)
port_scan_jobs Async nmap scan jobs with status and results
activity_log Audit trail of all admin actions taken via the dashboard
cloudflare_cname_status Local record of DNS CNAME registrations for Cloudflare Tunnel routes

Deployment

Option A: Backend on bare-metal + Frontend in container (Recommended)

# 1. Configure environment
cp .env.example .env
nano .env   # Set JWT_SECRET and other values

# 2. Build and start the backend
chmod +x start.sh
./start.sh   # Runs cargo build --release, spawns daemon, writes to server.log

# 3. Start the frontend container
podman compose up -d --build
# or: docker compose up -d --build

# Frontend is now available at: http://localhost:3000
# Backend API is at:             http://localhost:8080

Option B: Backend serves frontend directly (single binary)

Build the Vue frontend into the static/ directory, and the Axum backend will serve it as a fallback:

cd frontend-vue
npm install
npm run build   # Outputs to ../static/
cd ..
./start.sh

# Dashboard available at: http://localhost:8080

Adding a Server

  1. Open the dashboard at http://localhost:3000
  2. Click Settings and then Add Server
  3. Fill in the Server Alias and Backend URL (e.g., http://100.127.55.109:8080).
  4. Click Add & Login. You must log in using an OS user account that belongs to the sudo or wheel group. Root logins are explicitly prohibited for security.

You can add multiple backend servers to a single frontend dashboard and switch between them. Furthermore, the dashboard supports adding multiple OS users to a single server connection, allowing you to quickly hot-swap between users (e.g. from infratek to webmaster) using the profile dropdown.

API Endpoints

InfoIn Server exposes a REST API with over 85 endpoints. All protected endpoints require a JWT token in the Authorization: Bearer <token> header.

(Key areas: auth, metrics, system_mgmt, users_mgmt, services_mgmt, syslogs, cron_mgmt, ports, disk, speedtest, firewall, fail2ban, cloudflare, container, compose, files)

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

InfoIn Server is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from any commercial monitoring product.

About

No description, website, or topics provided.

Resources

Readme
Activity

Stars

0 stars

Watchers

0 watching

Forks

0 forks
Report repository

Releases

Packages

Contributors

Languages