Built a zero-bloat, pure-SSH Terminal Operations Center & KVM Orchestrator for Debian (runs 24/7 on tty1)

Hey everyone,

Like many of you, I manage a mixed fleet of bare-metal hypervisors, Raspberry Pis, and customer VPS instances. Every machine is hardened differently, but they all share one reliable standard: SSH.

Modern monitoring stacks often felt overly heavy for my needs—bloated web apps, continuous database writes, and web dashboards that crawl when you're checking in from a phone over spotty cellular coverage. Plus, on my servers, password authentication is strictly forbidden; certificate- and key-based SSH gives me a security baseline exposed HTTPS endpoints just can't match. Being a child of the 70s who grew up on the command line, I wanted something lightweight and distraction-free that I could keep running 24/7 on the physically attached monitor (tty1).

So I wrote TermNOC on Debian 13 (Trixie).

What it does:

• termnoc-display: An asynchronous, 5-second polling HUD built with Python's Rich framework. Gives real-time hypervisor metrics, direct libvirt/virsh VM statuses, internal LAN device health (ping & port checks), and remote fleet connectivity.
• termnoc-menu: An interactive TUI orchestrator to manage KVM lifecycles, run fleet-wide batch updates, jump into SSH sessions, and deploy fresh Debian 13 guest VMs via Preseed in under two minutes.
• 100% YAML-driven: Everything lives cleanly in /etc/termnoc/.

It's completely open source (MIT) and up on GitHub.

I’ve put together a write-up covering the background, architecture, and screenshots here:

👉https://blake-hofer.net/termnoc

Curious to hear your thoughts and how you handle minimal, agentless telemetry across your nodes!

Have fun!

DBH