Hi everyone.
I’m planning to open a small gym and am looking for management software. I don’t want cloud services or a subscription fee. I use Linux in my personal life and would prefer to keep running that at the business. Does anyone have experience with this type of thing?
I plan to self host all my services and data if possible such as camera systems and maybe even the website (I found a great local website company I’ll be talking with soon).
I’ve been using Ubiquiti/Unifi for my brewery setup (cameras, several private networks, phone tree stuff). It comes with some pretty solid management software accessible through the local network, but under the hood, everything’s just running Alpine. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you keep the management software installed (firmware updates wipe out the crontab, for example), but you can customize it pretty aggressively if you know your way around a terminal.
I used to love Ubiquiti but they’re turning into cunts these days. I also heard there’s been a lot of people leave and low morale due to the enshitification of the products.
I’ve since put OpenWRT onto my ERX and ER4. Will likely put it on the UAP-LC next to get rid of it entirely.
That honestly sounds like the way to go, and I’ll probably look into it when I have more time. I’m more a software person than a sysadmin and I’m not wildly confident that I won’t accidentally close us down for a few days without a lot of prep. 😆
What sort of stuff are you running? Inventory and stock? Do you have any temperature control, gravity or production record keeping software?
I’ve been searching for brewery management software that I can self host. Currently just have odoo for invoicing.
Inventory is through our POS/processor and production records are through Beer30 (though I have plans to write my own and open source it when I have time; we just opened and we’re all still running pretty hard doing new-open stuff). We’re also technically a nano-brewery, so anything we’re doing is a little bespoke (i.e., I think it’s a very situational setup) right now.
The biggest thing from a brewery-specific side that we’re doing is controlling the brewhouse. We’re running an all-electric system, and all the heating and cellar controls expose UIs over the LAN. In addition to being generally nifty, we’re using Unifi to separate brewery-specific stuff onto its own network and the built-in VPN hosting (I opted for the OpenVPN option) to expose that network security. This allows our brewer to do stuff like check the temperature from home or set the boil kettle to start running before he leaves the house. (The useful thing about the UDM (primary server) running Alpine is that I have a task that essentially functions as dynamic DNS and updates an A record with our domain provider so he can always log in at a known hostname).
It also integrates with cameras, phone, and menu boards, which are all useful for the FoH side of things.
All-in-all, we’re not doing that much with it yet, but it’s pretty nice to use so far, and being a software engineer, I’m excited for the possibilities of useful stuff I can host on it.
I’ll keep them in mind when I design my network. Thank you