A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I run my NAS and Home Assistant on bare metal.
Both of those are much easier to manage on bare metal. Everything else runs virtualized on my Proxmox cluster, whether it's Docker stacks on a dedicated VM, an application that I want to run separately in an LXC, or something heavier in its own VM.
The fact that I bought all my machines used (and mostly on sale), and that not one of them is general purpose, id est, I bought each piece of hardware with a (more or less) concrete idea of what would be its use case. For example, my machine acting as a file server is way bigger and faster than my desktop, and I have a 20-year-old machine with very modest specs whose only purpose is being a dumb client for all the bigger servers. I develop programs in one machine and surf the internet and watch videos on the other. I have no use case for VMs besides the Logical Domains I setup in one of my SPARC hosts.
I've not cracked the docker nut yet. I don't get how I backup my containers and their data. I would also need to transfer my Plex database into its container while switching from windows to Linux, I love Linux but haven't figured out these two things yet
All your docker data can be saved to a mapped local disk, then backup is the same as it ever is. Throw borg or something on it and you're gold.
Look into docker compose and volumes to get an idea of where to start.
Warms me heart to see people in this thread thinking for themselves and not doing something just because other people are.
In my case it’s performance and sheer RAM need.
GLM 4.5 needs like 112GB RAM and absolutely every megabyte of VRAM from the GPU, at least without the quantization getting too compressed to use. I’m already swapping a tiny bit and simply cannot afford the overhead.
I think containers may slow down CPU<->GPU transfers slightly, but don’t quote me on that.
There’s one thing I’m hosting on bare metal, a WebDAV server. I’m running it on the host because it uses PAM for authentication, and that doesn’t work in a container.
Anything you want dedicated performance on or require fine tuning for a specific performance use cases. Theyre out there.
What are you doing running your vms on bare metal? Time is a flat circle.
My servers and NAS were created long before Docker was a thing, and as I am running them on a rolling release distribution there never was a reason to change anything. It works perfectly fine the way it is, and it will most likely run perfectly fine the next 10+ years too.
Well I am planning, when I find the time to research a good successor, to replace my aging HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 that I use as Homeserver/NAS. Maybe I will then setup everything clean and migrate the services to docker/podman/whatever is fancy then. But most likely I will only transfer all the disks and keep the old system running on newer hardware. Life is short...
I generally abstract to docker anything I don't want to bother with and just have it work.
If I'm working on something that requires lots of back and forth syncing between host and container, I'll run that on bare metal and have it talk to things in docker.
Ie: working on an app or a website or something in language of choice on framework of choice, but postgres and redis are living in docker. Just the app I'm messing with and it's direct dependencies run outside.
I have a single micro itx htpc/media server/nas in my bedroom. Why use containers?
I would always run proxmox to set up docker VMs.
I found Talos Linux, which is a dedicated distro for kubernetes. Which aligned with my desire to learn k8s.
It was great. I ran it as bare-metal on a 3 node cluster. I learned a lot, I got my project complete, everything went fine.
I will use Talos Linux again.
However next time, I'm running proxmox with 2 VMs per node - 3 talos control VMs and 3 talos worker VMs.
I imagine running 6 servers with Talos is the way to go. Running them hyperconverged was a massive pain. Separating control plane and data/worker plane (or whatever it is) makes sense - it's the way k8s is designed.
It wasn't the hardware that had issues, but various workloads. And being able to restart or wipe a control node or a worker node would've made things so much easier.
Also, why wouldn't I run proxmox?
Overhead is minimal, get nice overview, get a nice UI, and I get snapshots and backups
I don't host on containers because I used to do OS security for a while.
Say more, what did that experience teach you? And, what would you do instead?
@kiol I mean, I use both. If something has a Debian package and is well-maintained, I'll happily use that. For example, prosody is packaged nicely, there's no need for a container there. I also don't want to upgrade to the latest version all the time. Or Dovecot, which just had a nasty cache bug in the latest version that allows people to view other peoples' mailboxes. Since I'm still on Debian 12 on my mail server, I remain unaffected and I can let the bugs be shaken out before I upgrade.
TrueNAS is on bare metal has I have a dedicated NAS machine that's not doing everything else and also is not recommended to virtualize. Not sure if that counts.
Same for the firewall (opnsense) since it is it's own machine.
For me it's lack of understanding usually. I haven't sat down and really learned what docker is/does. And when I tried to use it once I ended up with errors (thankfully they all seemed contained by the docker) but I just haven't gotten around to looking more into than seeing suggestions to install say Pihole in it. Pretty sure I installed Pihole outside of one. Jellyfin outside, copyparty outside, and I something else im forgetting at the moment.
I was thinking of installing a chat app in one, but I put off that project because I got busy at work and it's not something I normally use.
I guess I just haven't been forced to see the upsides yet. But am always wanting to learn
containerisation is to applications as virtual machines are to hardware.
VMs share the same CPU, memory, and storage on the same host.
Containers share the same binaries in an OS.
Mainly that I don't understand how to use containers... or VMs that well... I have and old MyCloud NAS and little pucky PC that I wanted to run simple QoL services on... HomeAssistant, JellyFin etc...
I got Proxmox installed on it, I can access it.... I don't know what the fuck I'm doing... There was a website that allowed you to just run scripts on shell to install a lot of things... but now none of those work becuase it says my version of Proxmox is wrong (when it's not?)... so those don't work....
And at least VMs are easy(ish) to understand. Fake computer with OS... easy. I've built PCs before, I get it..... Containers just never want to work, or I don't understand wtf to do to make them work.
I wanted to run a Zulip or Rocket.chat for internal messaging around the house (wife and I both work at home, kid does home/virtualschool).... wanted to use a container because a service that simple doesn't feel like it needs a whole VM..... but it won't work...