Pages tagged with 'Containers'

Not all containers are whales 🐳

What's this? A new website?

2022-10-30
9Ā minutes

Hello internet, it's been a while. I've been working on something for a while, and today's the day I get to finally release it! Yes, I redid my website - again! But, depending on how often you talk to me, I redid my website finally. This update has been a…

Upgrading Databases in Docker

2021-12-23
4Ā minutes

For me, every Monday is updates day. I run through all the entries in my Ansible hosts file and install any updates which may need running. All machines have OS updates, and the handful which run docker get their containers pulled. However, pulling containers merely updates the underlying container OS,…

LXC vs Docker

2021-10-29
4Ā minutes

Both LXC and Docker are great containerization technologies, brought to you by the powers of the Linux kernel. At their core, they’re pretty similar, but the further out you look, the differences increase massively. At their heart, they’re both still containers - understanding the differences between the 2 takes a…

Docker in LXC

Docker is a great containerization technology for running applications. It keeps multiple applications completely isolated from each other, only allowing connections exactly when you tell them to. But what if you’re on a hypervisor? You want your host OS to be as lean as possible (else it defeats the point),…

Mount NFS inside LXC containers

NFS is a great protocol for sharing files quickly and simply over the network. Whilst it’s not designed for end user use, it’s great for mounting directories from remote machines, and having them be performant. NFS’ lack of authentication is in a way a feature, honest. Not only does it…

Backing up and restoring Docker containers

2020-12-06
3Ā minutes

You should back up your data, properly! If you’re not, you’re playing a dangerous game with fate. Computers are pretty reliable, but they also go wrong, often. You should always backup your files, but backing up a containerized application isn’t quite as simple. A container is 3 things:ConfigurationVolumesNetworking The point…

Increase your Docker IP space

Recently, I started setting up a new application on my docker host. It was late in the day, and I just wanted to get something up and working to play around with. Just my luck, I was met with wonderfully cryptic error:ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address…

Using Scrutiny to monitor your drives

After recently deploying a ZFS pool, I realized I had little insight into the health of my drives. I can run SMART stats now and then, but that’s not quite the same.Scrutiny Scrutiny is a tool to help you with just that. It presents a web UI which shows you…

Hello World with Traefik

2020-09-17
7Ā minutes

I’ve been using Traefik for a while now, and I’ve helped quite a few people with it, but I still see a lot of people scared off it. This isn’t helped by a lot of guides being incredibly verbose, and not explaining what’s going on very well. Most people I…

Observing Traefik with InfluxDB

Traefik’s dashboard is a great tool to diagnose routing issues, and check services are being detected correctly, but it can’t do much more than that. It doesn’t show any metrics. Instead, it relies (arguably correctly) on external monitoring tools for metrics. Traefik supports 4 metric backends: Datadog, Prometheus, StatsD and…

Calming down Clickhouse

2020-09-02
2Ā minutes

Clickhouse is a column oriented database engine, mostly designed for analytics. It was developed and deployed by Yandex in their analytics offering, but Plausible, my analytics provider of choice, uses it to store the analytics data, as it’s more suited to this than PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, the official docker container is…

Container processes shouldn't run as root!

2020-08-18
2Ā minutes

Docker containers, and containers as a whole, are really just a regular program wrapped in some extra protections provided by the kernel (namely cgroups etc) to create isolation, and other interesting features. Unlike VMs, containers run closer to the host operating system, so close they use the same kernel, meaning…

Self hosting Plausible

2020-08-05
3Ā minutes

I only recently talked about using GoAccess as an analytics tool. Over the last couple months, I’ve been more interested in how many hits this website actually gets. GoAccess was a really simple solution which worked on log files and only captured the bits of information I really cared about:…

Keeping your Docker containers up to date

2020-07-27
3Ā minutes

Last year, I switched all of my hosting from arbitrarily installed packages to Docker. This made installing and configuring incredibly simple, but updating a little less defined. Whilst Docker itself is updated through the system package manager (probably), the containers themselves aren’t. Docker container versions are known as ā€œtagsā€, and…

Traefik Basics

2020-05-01
4Ā minutes

Traefik is a cloud native reverse proxy, which is basically a fancy way of saying it’s a reverse proxy with some fancy features. Specifically it has fancy features around auto-discovery, and deep integration with technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.Basic concepts Traefik has four fundamental concepts: Entrypoints, routers, middleware and services.

Self hosting my website

A few days ago, I was sharing a blog post to someone on the self-hosted podcast discord, and they asked if I was self-hosting my website. Unfortunately, and rather ironically, I had to answer no. I’ve been intending to move it over to my own server for a while, so…