What Eight.ly OS sends¶
Eight.ly OS runs on your hardware and your files stay there. It does contact our update server, updates.eight.ly, on its own. This is the complete list, read from the code, of what it sends, when, and why. The same list is on eight.ly/privacy. If anything is added, it appears here before it ships.
On its own¶
| What | Which boxes | When | What it sends |
|---|---|---|---|
| Update check | Every box | At start, then every 6 hours | Edition, processor type, current version. No licence key. When an update is offered, it also fetches that release's checksum and signature files, with the licence token on an activated box. |
| Licence check-in | Activated | About 5 seconds after start, then every 24 hours, and right after activation | Licence token and a hardware fingerprint: one-way hashes of the system ID, the main network card's address and the boot disk's serial. If the boot disk changed, also the install ID and the old and new fingerprints. |
| App catalogue | Activated | At start, then every 24 hours | Licence token only. Downloads the Docker app and LXC container catalogues. |
| Seat release retry | Only after deactivating while offline | Every 15 minutes until it succeeds | Licence key and install ID. |
| Clock and packages | Every box | Continuous / daily | Time from Debian's public NTP pool; a daily package list check against the Debian, Docker, Cloudflare and NVIDIA repositories. Only Debian security updates install automatically. |
The licence check-in has no off switch. If it fails, the box keeps working. The update check can be turned off by starting the service with EIGHTLY_UPDATES_URL=off.
When you do something¶
- Activate: licence key, install ID, hardware fingerprint and the box's host name.
- Deactivate: licence key and install ID.
- Features you set up talk to the services you chose: Cloudflare (your API token), notifications (the address you enter), backups (your backup server), and app installs (container registries such as Docker Hub and GitHub).
- Create Container reads the image list from
images.linuxcontainers.org. - Install the NVIDIA driver downloads it from
download.nvidia.com. - Publish an app looks up your public address at
api.ipify.organd checks DNS at1.1.1.1. - Sync now / Check now buttons repeat the update check and catalogue sync.
What it does not send¶
Your files or their names, which apps you run, how you use the box, crash reports or analytics. The dashboard loads no outside scripts, fonts or trackers. The one exception is the Requests page, where your browser loads film posters from image.tmdb.org.
Where this comes from¶
Read from the Eight.ly OS source on 2026-11-01: internal/updater/updater.go (update check), pkg/api/license/catalog_service.go, boot_rebind.go and fingerprint.go (check-in), license.go (activation and catalogue), lxc_catalog.go, seats.go (seat release) and iso/build.sh (time and packages).