The lab agent: alerts with your PC off, changes with a PIN, and installing it from the app

The post of 2026-10-08 introduced the lab agent: an optional small program you run on a Linux machine in your lab, so Control Board keeps monitoring when your PC is off. Since then it has gained three capabilities, all of which are in Control Board for Windows 0.11.57, where the agent is a preview.

Alerts while your PC is off. The app on your PC hands the agent the places you send alerts to: ntfy, Pushover, Gotify, webhooks, and now email. While the app runs, it sends alerts itself. Once it has been closed for about a minute, the agent takes over, so no alert is lost between the two. A switch in Settings turns this off.

Changes through the agent, only when you allow them. Each copy of the app paired with the agent only reads until you allow it, with a PIN kept on the agent. Then, for the parts of your lab only the agent reads, that copy can run the agent’s own actions, start and shut down guests, restart and scale Kubernetes workloads, and open a terminal on a host. Anything that can take something down asks for its name and the agent’s PIN, and the agent keeps its own log of every change and of which copy asked for it. The UPS shutdown order can run on the agent too, so your guests still shut down in order when the power fails after your PC is already off.

Installing it from the app. Setting the agent up used to mean building it and running a script by hand. Now the app carries the agent itself: one small program that runs on any 64-bit Linux machine, x86 or ARM, with nothing else to install. In Sources, give the machine’s address and an SSH login, tick “Install the agent there first”, and the app on your PC copies it over, installs it as a service and pairs with it. Ticking it again later updates it.

What’s next: letting the app create the agent’s container itself, through your Proxmox, and moving this PC’s sources over to the agent.