Selfhosted

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.

Warms me heart to see people in this thread thinking for themselves and not doing something just because other people are.

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

It's just another system to maintain, another link in the chain that can fail.

I run all my services on my personal gaming pc.

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.

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

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

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 don't host on containers because I used to do OS security for a while.

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.

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 thought about running something like proxmox, but everything is too pooled, too specialized, or proxmox doesn't provide the packages I want to use.

Just went with arch as the host OS and firejail or lxc any processes i want contained.

@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.

I'm selfhosting Forgejo and i don't really see the benefit of migrating to a container, i can easily install and update it via the package manager so what benefit does containerization give?

I'm doing this on a couple of machines. Only running NFS, Plex (looking at a Jellyfin migration soon), Home Assistant, LibreNMS and some really small other stuff. Not using VMs or LXC due to low-end hardware (pi and older tiny pc). Not using containers due to lack of experience with it and a little discomfort with the central daemon model of Docker, running containers built by people I don't know.

The migration path I'm working on for myself is changing to Podman quadlets for rootless, more isolation between containers, and the benefits of management and updates via Systemd. So far my testing for that migration has been slow due to other projects. I'll probably get it rolling on Debian 13 soon.

I'm running a TrueNAS server on bare metal with a handful of hard drives. I have virtualized it in the past, but meh, I'm also using TrueNAS's internal features to host a jellyfin server and a couple of other easy to deploy containers.

my two bare metal servers are the file server and music server. I have other services in a pi cluster.

file server because I can't think of why I would need to use a container.

the music software is proprietary and requires additional complications to get it to work properly...or at all, in a container. it also does not like sharing resources and is CPU heavy when playing to multiple sources.

if either of these machines die, a temporary replacement can be sourced very easily(e.g. the back of my server closet) and recreated from backups while I purchase new or fix/rebuild the broken one.

IMO the only reliable method for containers is a cluster because if you're running several containers on a device and it fails you've lost several services.

Depends on the application for me. For Mastodon, I want to allow 12K character posts, more than 4 poll question choices, and custom themes. Can't do it with Docker containers. For Peertube, Mobilizon, and Peertube, I use Docker containers.