TinkerQuest - Codex on Hetzner with tailscale
New day. New approach. After my misadventure using ChatGPT Work on my phone I build up a Codex sandbox with Hetzner1 and tailscale2 this time.
Again, some early observations:
- Using codex in something else than YOLO mode is super cumbersome. So, having a secure environment is key. Hetzner servers are easy to set up and cheap too. So far I payed 0,50 Euro in server cost and the smallest instance was performant enough. The UX feels like it is from the 2010s but it is simple, no unnecessary frizzles, and it just works. I appreciate that.
- Docker SBX3 sandboxes are also interesting when running stuff on a personal computer, but my MacBook just isn’t up for that anymore.
- Tailscale is great. It just works and gives me a secure network to connect to my Hetzner sandbox. Great product and UX.
The next iteration of TinkerQuest - a CAD course for my 8yo son - has to be visual and consistent. So it has to become its own app on his iPad.
Still bound to my phone I need external compute and Hetzner is on my short list of things to try out. Within 5min I have an account and a server running.
Now, there is another tool on my short list: tailscale. I want this server to be locked down since it has access to a bunch of my accounts. I could fiddle with firewall settings and authentication but having it in a private network is the simpler approach. That is what tailscale is for. It runs on the server, my son’s iPad, and my phone so we all share the same network.
On my first try to install it curl fails because I was too cheap and didn’t pay for IP4 which broke domain resolution. The internet isn’t ready yet for IP6.
Till this point I used Hetzner‘s web terminal on my phone. That sounds as bad of an UX as you can imagine. I still need to ssh into my server but not like this. Suprisingly, mobile first terminal apps aren’t really a thing on Apple. The closest I got was TapSSH4 but that failed while establishing a connection without telling me why. So I ended up with WebSSH5. You take a desktop terminal and squish it into the iPhone. That is WebSSH. Not great but at least it works.
After a quick detour trying OpenClaw6 I am back to Codex on my server and I am running Sol sessions now from my phone by ssh-ing into my server within a private tailscale network.
By the way, setting up servers and networking infrastructure brought back some of the joy of my early days of learning programming. No terraform, or a million configs and settings, and 30min CI/CD pipelines. Just a server set up in under a minute and off we go.
Previous read: TinkerQuest - ChatGPT Work needs some love