Nibodhika

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Most people self-hosting don't need anything special, just a docker compose file. What proprietary software do you think is needed that's not needed for Podman?

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

You're not forced to use dockerhub or kubernetes, in fact I use neither. Also if a team chooses to host their images on dockerhub that's their choice, it's like saying git is bad because Microsoft owns GitHub, or that installing software X from the repos is better than compiling because you need to use GitHub to get the code.

Also docker images can also be easily mirrored, archived offline etc, and they will keep working after the packages you archived stop because the base version of some library got updated.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Next step on my self-hosting journey

I wouldn't perform illegal actions on a VPS, I know people do it, but it's like the difference from smoking pot inside your house or in a hotel (it's just as illegal in either, but one of them has a manager and staff whose job is to monitor the place and that can report you)

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Yes I'm aware of that, having written several systemd units for my own services in the past. But you're not likely to get any of that by default when you just install from the package manager as it's the discussion here, and most people will just use the default systemd unit provided, and in the vast majority of cases they don't provide the same level of isolation the default docker compose file does.

We're talking about ease of setting things up, anything you can do in docker you can do without, it's just a matter of how easy it is to get good standards. A similar argument to what you made would be that you can also install multiple versions of databases directly on your OS.

For example I'm 99% sure the person I replied to has this file for service:

[Unit]
Description=Plex Media Server
After=network.target network-online.target

[Service]
# In this file, set LANG and LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8 on non-English systems to avoid mystery crashes.
EnvironmentFile=/etc/conf.d/plexmediaserver
ExecStart=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\x20Media\x20Server
SyslogIdentifier=plexmediaserver
Type=simple
User=plex
Group=plex
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5
StartLimitInterval=60s
StartLimitBurst=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Some good user isolation, but almost nothing else, and I doubt that someone who argued that installing from the package manager is easier will run systemctl edit on what he just installed to add extra security features.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

So if someone made a non-foss frontend for Podman that would somehow make Podman less FOSS? Or of they started working with Podman? You don't need to use any of those other products, and it's not correct to say that docker is less FOSS because people have written proprietary software that uses it.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Next step on my self-hosting journey

He specifically mentioned huge storage, I'm guessing that you have less than 100GB for that price. Also he mentioned ARR stack, I wouldn't host that on a VPS.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Docker, there are more resources for it and once you know it Podman should be an easy migration if you want to. Also I'm not sure about your claim that Podman is more FOSS than docker, it's "better" because it doesn't run as root, but other than that I don't know of any advantages to it that are not a derivation of "it runs as a regular user".

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Should I learn Docker or Podman?

Maybe they're having issues with his answer of "using an OS" which implies other people are not? IDK.

But as to you if you're running just one or two services from a machine you also use for other stuff using packages and systems services is perfectly fine. If you have dedicated hardware for it (or plan on having it), it starts to make sense to look at ways of making things easier for yourself in the long run. Docker solves lots of issues no one's talking about (because no one is facing them anymore), e.g.:

• Different services requiring different versions of the same library/database/etc
• Moving your service from one computer to another
• Service requiring specific steps for updates (this is not entirely gone, but it's much better and it's prevents you from breaking your services by doing a random operation like updating your system)
• Pinning versions of services until you decide to update without needing to sacrifice system updates for it (I know you can pin a version of a package, but if you don't upgrade it it will break when you upgrade it's dependencies)
• Easily map ports or block access in a generic way, no need to discover how each service config file allows that, you can just do it at the container level. e.g. databases that can't be accessed from the network or even from within the host machine (I mean, they can obviously be accessed from the host system, just not in the traditional way, so a user who gains access to your machine on a user that's not allowed to use docker can't)
• Isolation between services
• Isolation from host machine
• Reproducibility of services (i.e. one small docker compose file guarantees a reproducible host of services)
• Endurance that no service is running as root (even if they only work as root)
• Spin services in minutes to test stuff up and clean them out thoroughly in seconds.

There's probably many more reasons to use docker. Plus once you've learned it it's very easy for small self-hosted stuff so there's really no reason not to use it. Every time I see someone saying they don't use docker and don't understand why people use it I'm a bit baffled, it's like someone claiming he doesn't understand why people use knifes to cut bread when the two-handed axe he uses for chopping wood works (like, yes, it does work, but it's obviously not the best tool for the job)

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Can a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM handle my needs?

Not sure if that much, their CPU benchmark is pretty close.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Can a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM handle my needs?

If that's not powerful enough a raspberry pi isn't either, that CPU ranks slightly higher than the one on a pi 5 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5743vs2633/ARM-Cortex-A76-4-Core-2400-MHz-vs-Intel-Pentium-G4400T

Also I don't know how I forgot about this (since it's what I do a lot of the times), but you can buy from other Amazon's in Europe, for example in Spain you can get this CPU https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6500T+%40+2.50GHz&id=2627 which is almost double the benchmark of a Pi for 127 https://amzn.eu/d/6UwsUqf

Those mini PCs are awesome, the only reason my home server isn't one of them is because I have a 3.5" HDD which doesn't fit in them, but I'm looking to switch to some other alternative because the franken-desktop I have now uses too much power for what it's doing.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Can a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM handle my needs?

You can try a mini PC, you mentioned Germany so for example this https://amzn.eu/d/0Evab2M I think that should be a bit more powerful than a Pi, but not sure by how much.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Simple authentication for homelab?

Login is a dangerous and difficult thing to implement, are you sure that all of your services:

• Store passwords hashed and salted
• Have brute-force prevention
• Etc

It's safer to have one service focused on that and other services can rely on that one to implement it correctly.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Too many issues with Lychee. Any alternative ?

I needed this comment a few weeks ago. Updated it and everything broke, still haven't been able to recover from it. I'm considering moving to a different software just because it's absurd that it breaks so completely if you don't thread very carefully, most software I have ever worked with has migration protocols for when there's db changes to avoid this sort of thing.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Selfhosted photo manager kind of like Jellyfin

NixOS packages only work with NixOS system. They're harder to setup than just copying a docker-compose file over and they do use container technology. If the idea is to remove complexity from the setup, NixOS goes in the opposite direction.

Also without containers you don't solve the biggest problems such as incompatible database versions between multiple services.

I stand by what I said, I can give a 2 step tutorial on setting up any docker system (copy this compose file, run up on it), anything simpler than that wouldn't be as robust in terms of configurations.

Nibodhika , 3 months ago to Selfhosted in Selfhosted photo manager kind of like Jellyfin

You should learn docker if you care about self hosting stuff though. You might lose 1 day learning the basics of docker, but the practicity of being able to spin up services just to test them it's well worth it.

Personally I use Immich for photo management, but not sure it it's packaged as an RPM, and even if it is you'll need to setup the database yourself. Nextcloud also possibly works but again setting Nextcloud without containers is a PitA.

Someone asking for a service to self host that refuses to use docker is similar to a person who wants to run a server but refuses to learn CLI, yes it can be done, but you're making your life hard for no purpose and everyone else will just give you the simple solution.