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10 Comments

First Customer

Hi everyone, my very first paid customer signed up to my service the other night! I've been developing Packetriot for several months and with it you can create a globally accessible HTTP/TCP endpoint and serve out an application or service from any network.

I began working on

  1. 1

    Being a ngrok user. this looks great! Congratuialtions on the first customer.

    1. 1

      Thanks so much for the feedback! Please give us a try and if you have any questions don't hesitate reaching out.

  2. 1

    Congrats on the launch! It look great. how is this different from ngrok?

    1. 1

      Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!

      Packetriot shares some overlap with ngrok but there are some differences. I'll start by saying ngrok has been around for a while, is pretty awesome, and I discovered it a few months after I began in mid-2018. With that, let me first state some differences with the two services.

      Packetriot provides service checks, this means each endpoint you create and the service you attach to it, is monitored to see if its alive. If it looks down, we email you. Pingdom is a service that just provide this.

      Packetriot also provides all of the metrics and data you lose in systems like these, such as the IP address of hosts connecting to your endpoint, timestamps, amount of data transferred. We will be geolocating the IPs for you very soon.

      You can self-host Packetriot if you want for personal or commercial use. If you want to build a business with the technology you can start by using our managed service and when it grows and you want to control more of your infrastructure, you can host it on your own servers.

      The Packetriot client provides more features such as built in support for Lets-Encrypt, Secure Redirection and can serve static websites.

      Finally, we will be publishing the specs to our tunnel protocol and APIs, so others can write their own clients and integrations. We will publish a reference implementation, and once its finalize we will most likely opensource our official full-featured client.

      This is a long response but I hope it's helpful, cheers.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the detailed response. I'm going to give it a try, Do you have any installation instructions for linux, I saw that there was getting started,, but I don't see anything for linux

        tar -xvf pktriot-0.9.0.amd64.tar.gz but it's not clear what to do from there, It looks like the only files that got extracted are

        ./
        ./usr/
        ./usr/bin/
        ./usr/bin/pktriot
        ./usr/share/
        ./usr/share/pktriot/
        ./var/
        ./var/lib/
        ./var/lib/pktriot/
        ./etc/
        ./etc/pktriot/
        ./etc/systemd/
        ./etc/systemd/system/
        ./etc/systemd/system/pktriot.service
        

        It's not clear which one I'm supposed to use to run it

        1. 1

          Thanks for trying it out and the feedback, I'll add a README in there to help describe what you get. I'll try to briefly describe here. The /usr/bin/pktriot is the program. The /etc/systemd/system/pktriot.service is the systemd service unit file. You can use this make the pktriot a system service that stars on boot.

          The other directories aren't used buy may be used in the future. I think I'll trim them out since it may create some confusion.

          Let me know if I can help with anything else. You can also email me directory with [email protected]

          Thanks!

  3. 1

    Hi.

    Great accomplishment on the 1st customer!!!

    Took a look at the site. While I know you didn't ask for feedback, here's my $0.02 worth of thoughts.

    The default page describes what the process does. However it doesn't really describe why you need it! Think of the guy who's non-tech, starting out, etc.. It might help to give a few "real-world" use cases. Walk the reader through how customer A who's trying to do ABC would use your process to reach the world!!!

    Describe how your site would be better than a user using a cheap server from Scaleaway/DigitalDomain/etc..

    Give the user a pic/description of whatever badass dashboard screens/data/metrics you provide. Eye candy sometimes goes a long way to get the starting guy to use/test/pay for your project!!!

    Hope this helps.

    Good Luck

    1. 1

      Thanks for the taking the time to look at my site and share your thoughts, I appreciate the feedback!

      Your suggestions will certainly help inform the visitors to my home page more than what I'm doing now. If you're familiar with Scaleway and DO, would you be interested in trying out my service? :) If so, just email me at [email protected].

      Thanks again, cheers!

  4. 1

    Awesome news! The first one is always the hardest!

    1. 1

      Thanks! This one meant so much, it was so exciting and I almost couldn't believe it.

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