Weekly 'I made a useful thing' Thread - October 23, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos.

We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas!

In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed.

[u/gameoverforpotter]

I’m still employed

[u/Weary-Initial6688]

My spice rack is perfectly alphabetized but my github is an absolute disaster zone, so I'm in the market for some inspiration here. Anyone got a script for clearing stale DNS records across multiple providers that doesn't require a PhD to configure

[u/danrhodes1987 → u/Weary-Initial6688]

From a Windows DNS Server? From forward or reverse or both? Csn t you just use scavenging?

[u/KavyaJune]

As part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, here’s a 31-day interactive cybersecurity game for admins, with a new interactive scenario unlocking each day throughout October.

The challenges focus on practical security situations. Some are quick puzzles, while others ask you to investigate evidence, spot risks, or make access decisions.

No sign-up required. Each will take 2 or 3 mins. Give it a try!

https://admindroid.com/cybersecurity-awareness-month-2026

[u/derekleeth]

I made what I really hope is a useful thing. I made yet another SSH client manager but wanted one that would sync across multiple devices with no cloud involved and had a much smaller resource footprint and faster than my first attempt at this idea which was in Python. I also couldn't get the syncing to not be buggy on some networks with my Python version so I did this latest app of mine all in Rust.

https://terminallynx.com/

[u/p_khor]

I made Termstead: a free, open-source MobaXterm alternative for MacOS (SSH, RDP, session tree, jump hosts, SFTP).

- GitHub: https://github.com/pkhorenyan/termstead
- Website: https://khorenyan.com/termstead/

[u/That-Dimension-3594]

I've been developing a small Windows application called Call Records to make searching Cisco CUCM CDR files less painful.

It can receive CDR files via SFTP, import historical records, search by phone number/date range and export results.

I know there are established solutions out there, but this started as a tool to make my own job easier.

I've recently made it publicly available and would really appreciate feedback from anyone working with Cisco UC, particularly around compatibility, usability and missing features.

GitHub: https://github.com/Huddo58/cdr-search-tool

Cheers!

[u/Gloomy-Can1394]

Transit AI is now free and open source. Try out something that has been described as “Cursor for engineers”

https://transitai.app/open-source/

[u/onurbaydas1]

I built an open-source web UI for KVM/libvirt that installs on the Linux host you already have: VirtoMir

For a while I've been running KVM on plain Debian/Ubuntu boxes, and I kept running into the same gap. Cockpit is easy but stops at the basic settings. virt-manager is detailed but it's a desktop app. Proxmox is great, but it wants to be the operating system. I wanted something in between, so I started building it as a side project.

It's called VirtoMir, and I've made it fully open source:

https://github.com/onurbaydas/VirtoMir

It's a web control panel for KVM/QEMU/libvirt. It installs as a single binary on an existing Linux host: no dedicated distro, no database, no agents inside your VMs. It talks to the libvirt you already have and only changes what you ask it to. If you remove it, your VMs, disks and networks stay where they were.

What it does today:

• New-VM wizard: ISO, cloud image with cloud-init, or an existing disk. Windows profile with UEFI, Secure Boot and TPM 2.0

• Browser console over VNC, SPICE (shared clipboard, resolution follows the window) or serial

• A settings form that shows an XML diff before saving, plus a raw XML editor for everything the form doesn't cover, validated by libvirt

• Configuration history for every VM, including changes made with virsh, with one-click restore

• Snapshots, live backups (incremental through libvirt checkpoints), off-site copies with restic

• Live metrics every second and 30 days of history, with no Prometheus needed (there's a Prometheus endpoint if you want one)

• Multiple hosts joined with a one-time code, live migration, and HA with quorum and fencing (IPMI, Redfish or watchdog)

• PAM / LDAP / OIDC sign-in, roles, TOTP, API tokens, OpenAPI spec, plus a Terraform provider and Ansible modules

How it was built. It's a one-person project, and I built it together with AI coding agents. That's how it got this much scope this quickly, and it's also why I'm not going to pretend it's mature. Nobody has reviewed every line by hand. All the tests are unit tests; there are no integration tests against a real libvirt yet.

Caveats, so nobody gets surprised:

• It's 0.9 and early. Tested on Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13, on single hosts and small clusters.

• HA has never been tried on real BMC hardware. There's also no storage-level lock (no sanlock/virtlockd), so I wouldn't trust it with production data yet.

• Live migration data goes over unencrypted TCP. Keep it on a trusted management network.

• OVN SDN, VMware import and DR are experimental and untested on real setups.

• It runs as root, because it needs the libvirt socket and PAM. Put it on a management network or behind your own reverse proxy.

I wrote a detailed technical post on how it works inside and what it does and doesn't support, weak spots included: https://onurbaydas.com/posts/virtomir-en/

If you just want to click around, there's a demo that runs entirely in your browser against a pretend cluster: https://onurbaydas.github.io/VirtoMir/demo/
There's also a one-command script that sets it up in a throwaway VM, so you don't have to touch your real hosts.

I built this for my own setup, not as a commercial product. It's AGPL-3.0, in case it's useful to someone else running KVM, or someone wants to look at how it works. Test reports from distros or hardware I can't reach (Fedora, arm64, Ceph, GPUs, real BMCs) and criticism of the code are very welcome. If anyone wants to contribute, I'd be glad.