The discussion revolves around improving the Discourse admin UI to display the state of key stack components, such as OS and Docker versions, to alert users about required upgrades. Amicable shares a personal experience where an outdated OS caused issues, highlighting the need for better visibility in the web UI. pfaffman explains that accessing host OS information through Docker is difficult due to isolation, but shares a custom dashboard solution that provides detailed system and upgrade information, including OS version and disk usage. Amicable acknowledges the complexity and expresses hope for a simpler, community-driven solution, while accepting the need to log in more frequently for maintenance.
I run the discourse instance through the admin Web UI on a Digital Ocean droplet and only SSH in when I really have to.
It would help long term maintenance if we were able to see the state of the key elements in the stack through the web UI, such as OS version, maybe docker version too, so that we are alerted well in advance.
Thanks for that! I’m a bit surprised it’s so tricky. I was thinking I could expose an endpoint (/admin/os_info) that gathers OS info using basic sys commands & then use Ember to create an admin route & get that info into a simple template. Even better, maybe that someone had already done sthg similar that I could adapt for a simple solution.
But thanks anyway for your pointer. I was hoping to help others that might stall like I did with a largely hands-off installation only to find it seizes up after a few years. I guess I’ll just login more often
. It had been setup 5 years ago and no OS upgrades since.