Owner Guide

Five things to learn, total

The whole user-facing model is five ideas. Everything else is the machine's problem.

  1. The paper phrase. A 7-word phrase the computer generates (you never invent a password anywhere in this product). You copy it onto paper by hand and type it at every boot. Unplug the machine and it is a sealed brick until you do.
  2. An optional spare. A second phrase for a trusted person — for example, if you're away and the power blinks. You can revoke it from the dashboard at any time.
  3. Login words. A separate, shorter generated phrase that unlocks the desktop and dashboard. Locking the screen is not the same job as unlocking the disk, so they aren't the same secret.
  4. The status dashboard. Plain-language cards — “Your site is up”, “Something needs attention” — driven by a health probe that reads facts about the running system. There is no web admin panel and no browser on the box; you view your site from your phone, via a QR code.
  5. The repair path. If something breaks, the dashboard's repair tools and the firewall's fail-closed checks are designed to return the machine to a known-good state, not leave you debugging a server.

Installing, step by step

  1. Download the ISO and verify its SHA-256 (see Download).
  2. Write it to a USB stick and boot the spare PC from it.
  3. Click through the installer. When the phrase page appears, copy the phrase onto paper carefully — and prove the copy by re-typing the words it asks for.
  4. Pick a site type: pages, a journal, or an app from the catalogue.
  5. Write something, press Go Live, and scan the QR code with your phone to see your new .onion site.

Backup and restore

Backups need no phrase to make — they're encrypted to a key derived from your disk phrase — and the phrase to restore. Keep the backup file on an external drive. If the machine dies, install Manioc Server on a replacement, restore from the backup with your paper phrase, and your site comes back with the same .onion address and the same content.

Lost the paper?

If the machine is still running, Maintenance mode lets you set a brand-new phrase without the old one — a deliberate, reviewed design decision, because “the server is right there, working, but can never be safely rebooted again” is the failure real people actually hit. If the machine is off and the paper is gone, the disk stays sealed. That's the point of it.