A small self-hosted lab.

One server, a lot of carefully wired open-source tools and a few projects of my own. Half of it is open to everybody, the rest is behind a login — and every login is granted by hand, one person at a time.

The lab is run by Dominic Messner and an AI agent, together: the agent writes and deploys the code, wires the services, reads the mail and answers the phone line; I decide what gets built and who gets in. That division of labour is the most interesting thing about this machine — and where a tool is somebody else's work, the page says so.

See what is running Request an account

6 tools open to anyone 9 more behind a login accounts on request no trackers, no ads

Open to everyone

No invitation needed. Four of these work without an account at all; the file share and the AI platform keep their own sign-in. Where a tool was written by someone else, that is said on the card — nothing here pretends to be ours.

Whiteboard

wbo.progs4u.com

Draw together in the browser in real time. Open a board, share the link, no account needed on either side.

Deliberately public, and the tool here that gets used by people who never heard of this machine: someone needs a board now, not an account.

Software: WBO / Whitebophir by lovasoa (AGPL) — we host it, we did not write it. github.com/lovasoa/whitebophir

Open the whiteboard →

Pastebin

bin.progs4u.com

Send someone a password or a log without leaving it in a chat. Text is encrypted in your browser before it is stored — the server only ever holds ciphertext.

For the one job chat does badly: hand something over once, with an expiry date, and keep no copy of it.

Software: PrivateBin — not ours, and deliberately so: the less of our own code touches your ciphertext, the better. github.com/PrivateBin/PrivateBin

Create a paste →

Diagram editor

mermaid.progs4u.com

Turn plain text into flowcharts, sequence and architecture diagrams. Edit, export, done.

Text in, picture out — no dragging boxes. The layout of this machine was drawn here before it was built.

Software: mermaid-live-editor by the mermaid-js team, drawing engine “mermaid” (both MIT) — hosting is the only part that is ours. github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-live-editor

Open the editor →

Diagram documents

mermaid-viewer.progs4u.com

Collect diagrams into one document, add notes between them, publish a single link that anybody can open — no account needed to read it.

Built here, because a folder of diagrams explains nothing. The document is the explanation; the diagrams are its illustrations.

Software: our own — and honest about it: the rendering inside it is mermaid, the document layer around it is what we wrote.

Open the viewer →

File share

fs.progs4u.com

Hand out files with an expiry date and a download limit, instead of attaching them. Links stop working on their own.

An attachment lives in two mailboxes forever. A link here stops working when it should, or when you say so.

Software: Gokapi by Forceu — a Firefox-Send alternative, set up here with end-to-end encryption; the code is upstream's. github.com/Forceu/Gokapi

Open the file share →

AI application platform

dify.progs4u.com

The workshop where the assistants and automations behind this lab are wired together. Public instance, own accounts.

Open because it is more useful open: the assistants that answer the phone line and sort the mail were built here first.

Software: Dify by LangGenius — open source, run here unmodified. github.com/langgenius/dify

Open the platform →

What is behind the login

Accounts are granted per person and per tool — you get the doors you need, not the whole house.

Your own page, right after login. Two lists, kept apart: what was opened for you personally, and the projects that are public by nature. No menu of things you cannot open.
Automation: n8n and Node-RED, wired to a message broker (Eclipse Mosquitto) on the same private network, so flows talk to each other and to the tools. This is the plumbing behind the rest of the list.
The tab player. It's MyTabs by louislam — a guitar and bass tablature player with audio sync and a MIDI synth — running here with a fork we maintain, which also reads PDF tab books, so scanned sheets and .gp files end up in one playlist.
A self-hosted AI workspace. Odysseus: chat, its own document store and its own web search, on this machine — a conversation does not have to leave it.
A voice line. A real Austrian phone number, answered by an assistant that takes the call, understands what is wanted and can call back. From outside it is invisible today — and it is the most unusual thing on this machine.
Everything is logged. Logins and access are recorded, so it is always clear who opened what.

Currently behind a login

portaln8n node-redmqtt tabsdev-tabs voice linechat snapotter

Each hostname sits behind Cloudflare Access: an email address is invited, logs in with a one-time code, and only then reaches anything.

Credit where it is due — these are other people's projects, run here: n8n, Node-RED (OpenJS Foundation), Eclipse Mosquitto, It's MyTabs by louislam (the PDF support in our fork is ours), Odysseus by odysseus-dev, SnapOtter. Our own work is the portal, the voice line, the diagram documents and the glue that holds the rest together.

How we work together

Two of us run this: Dominic, who decides, and an AI agent, which does the work on the machine. We talk over four channels — none of them a chat window somebody has to keep open, and every one of them leaves a record.

Mail. The agent has its own address, [email protected]. Only my own two addresses get through it; everything else is refused at the door. I write a sentence, and the answer comes back in the same thread with what it actually did.
Chat. A channel on the Buzz network for the quick back-and-forth and for the reports: the daily maintenance run, the mail it handled, the requests waiting for a decision. Where I answer in three words, it does the work.
The phone. The voice line on this machine is our own: the agent answers it, and it calls me when a job is finished — a spoken summary is sometimes the whole status report.
The portal. robot.progs4u.com is the agent's own dashboard: every service with its health, the maintenance history, who logged in when and what was opened. What it claims, I can check.

Who does what

The agent: writes and deploys the code, wires the containers, watches the services, reads the mail, answers the phone.
I decide: what gets built, who gets an account, and anything that touches access, money or data — the agent asks first and does not act on its own there.

Its account on the machine is a plain unix account, not root: a handful of named jobs — reload the web server, add a project, take a backup — and nothing beyond them. Every job it runs is written down.

What's new

Written down as it happens, and the page republishes itself every morning — a page that never changes is a page nobody needs to visit twice.

2026-11-01 The map of it — The portal now carries an index of every process with the links that reach it, and a tree underneath that shows what is connected to what — read from the platform's own records, so it cannot fall behind.

2026-10-13 Open to read — progs4u.com is reachable without a login from now on: anybody can read what runs here, open the public tools, and ask for an account from the page.

2026-10-13 The two of us — The page now says it out loud: this lab is run by Dominic Messner and an AI agent together, and every tool here that was written by somebody else is credited to them.

2026-10-13 A front page — progs4u.com stopped being a placeholder: what runs here, what is open to anybody, and how to ask for an account.

republished 2026-11-02 06:18 UTC · server up 14 days · 30 services running · 12 projects on the box · last nightly backup 2026-11-02 — all entries