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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Disagree. Their priorities are backwards.

    Company A releases a product, it runs closed-source proprietary firmware on-board, and it can’t be updated by the user even if bugs or compatibility issues are found later on in the product’s life cycle.

    Company B releases a product, it runs closed-source proprietary firmware on-board, but it can be updated by the user if bugs or compatibility issues are found later on in the product’s life cycle.

    According to the FSF, product A gets the stamp of approval, product B doesn’t. That makes no sense.



  • I use node_exporter + VictoriaMetrics + Grafana for network-wide system monitoring. node_exporter also has provisions to include text files placed in a directory you specify, as long as they’re written out in the right format. I use that capability on my systems to include some custom metrics, including CPU and memory usage of the top 5 processes on the system, for exactly this reason.

    The resulting file looks like:

    # HELP cpu_usage CPU usage for top processes in %
    # TYPE cpu_usage gauge
    cpu_usage{process="/usr/bin/dockerd",pid="187613"} 1.8
    cpu_usage{process="/usr/local/bin/python3",pid="190047"} 1.4
    cpu_usage{process="/usr/bin/cadvisor",pid="188999"} 1.0
    cpu_usage{process="/opt/mealie/bin/python3",pid="190114"} 0.9
    cpu_usage{process="/opt/java/openjdk/bin/java",pid="190080"} 0.9
    
    # HELP mem_usage Memory usage for top processes in %
    # TYPE mem_usage gauge
    mem_usage{process="/usr/local/bin/python3",pid="190047"} 3.0
    mem_usage{process="/usr/bin/Xvfb",pid="196573"} 2.4
    mem_usage{process="/usr/bin/Xvfb",pid="193606"} 2.4
    mem_usage{process="next-server",pid="194634"} 1.2
    mem_usage{process="/opt/mealie/bin/python3",pid="190114"} 1.2
    

    And it gets scraped every 15 seconds for all of my systems. The result looks like this for CPU and memory. Pretty boring most of the time, but it can be very valuable to see what was going on with the active processes in the moments leading up to a problem.












  • Got a friend or family member willing to let you drop a miniPC at their place?

    You could also go the offline route - buy two identical external drive setups, plug one into your machine and make regular backups to it, drop the other one in a drawer in your office at work. Then once a month or so swap them to keep the off-site one fresh.

    Also there’s really nothing wrong with cloud storage as long as you encrypt before uploading so they never have access to your data.

    Personally I do both. The off-site offline drive is for full backups of everything because space is cheap, while cloud storage is use for more of a “delta” style backup, just the stuff the changes frequently, because of the price. If the worst were to happen, I’d use the offsite drive to get the bulk infrastructure back up and running, and then the latest cloud copy for any recently added/modified files.




  • There are two ways to maintain a persistent data store for Docker containers: bind mounts and docker-managed volumes.

    A Docker managed volume looks like:

    datavolume:/data

    And then later on in the compose file you’ll have

    volumes:
      datavolume:
    

    When you start this container, Docker will create this volume for you in /var/lib/docker/volumes/ and will manage access and permissions. They’re a little easier in that Docker handles permissions for you, but they’re also kind of a PITA because now your compose file and your data are split apart in different locations and you have to spend time tracking down where the hell Docker decided to put the volumes for your service, especially when it comes to backups/migration.

    A bind mount looks like:

    ./datavolume:/data

    When you start this container, if it doesn’t already exist, “datavolume” will be created in the same location as your compose file, and the data will be stored there. This is a little more manual since some containers don’t set up permissions properly and, once the volume is created, you may have to shut down the container and then chown the volume so it can use it, but once up and running it makes things much more convenient, since now all of the data needed by that service is in a directory right next to the compose file (or wherever you decide to put it, since bind mounts let you put the directory anywhere you like).

    Also with Docker-managed volumes, you have to be VERY careful running your docker prune commands, since if you run “docker prune --volumes” and you have any stopped containers, Docker will wipe out all of the persistent data for them. That’s not an issue with bind mounts.


  • suicidaleggroll@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldHow to manage docker compose apps?
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    2 months ago

    Docker is far cleaner than native installs once you get used to it. Yes native installs are nice at first, but they aren’t portable, and unless the software is built specifically for the distro you’re running you will very quickly run into dependency hell trying to set up your system to support multiple services that all want different versions of libraries. Plus what if you want or need to move a service to another system, or restore a single service from a backup? Reinstalling a service from scratch and migrating over the libraries and config files in all of their separate locations can be a PITA.

    It’s pretty much a requirement to start spinning up separate VMs for each service to get them to not interfere with each other and to allow backup and migration to other hosts, and managing 50 different VMs is much more involved and resource-intensive than managing 50 different containers on one machine.

    Also you said that native installs just need an apt update && apt upgrade, but that’s not true. Services that are built into your package manager sure, but most services do not have pre-built packages for all distros. For the vast majority, you have to git clone the source, then build from scratch and install. Updating those services is not a simple apt update && apt upgrade, you have to cd into the repo, git pull, then recompile and reinstall, and pray to god that the dependencies haven’t changed.

    docker compose pull/up/down is pretty much all you need, wrap it in a small shell script and you can bring up/down or update every service with a single command. Also if you use bind mounts and place them in the directory for the service along side the compose file, now your entire service is self-contained in one directory. To back it up you just “docker compose down”, rsync the directory to the backup location, then “docker compose up”. To restore you do the exact same thing, just reverse the direction of the rsync. To move a service to a different host, you do the exact same thing, just the rsync and docker compose up are now being run on another system.

    Docker lets you compact an entire service with all of its dependencies, databases, config files, and data, into a single directory that can be backed up and/or moved to any other system with nothing more than a “down”, “copy”, and “up”, with zero interference with other services running on your system.

    I have 158 containers running on my systems at home. With some wrapper scripts, management is trivial. The thought of trying to manage native installs on over a hundred individual VMs is frightening. The thought of trying to manage this setup with native installs on one machine, if that was even possible, is even more frightening.