Almost 10 years ago I purchased a Synology NAS for local storage and backups. I was really happy with the ease of use and their support is top notch. I got it set up and didn’t think much about it. Fast forward and a deal on a used server comes around and all the sudden I have a lot to learn. Proxmox, TrueNas, Nginx Proxy Manager… a whole new world I had somehow never even thought about. The concept of virtual machines blew my mind. Spin up a machine, mess it up, tear it down, repeat. Kids wanted to host a Minecraft server. No problem, pterodactyl. But wait, pterodactyl wants to be installed in a machine that doesn’t have any other software installed. No problem, I got one of those! This is magic and I’m loving it. I mostly lurk around here but thanks to everyone who posts because this place is a great source of knowledge and sarcasm and I appreciate both!
Been working into docker. Running nginx proxy manager, paperless-ngx, WireGuard, adguard, bitwarden, Jellyfin, and a couple others right now. Some run in a container on the NAS, a couple on a pi, and the rest on the server. Much more to learn…
Let’s say you do like me and configure multiple LXCs and VMs in Proxmox to keep your services segregated, and you want to run Docker services on all of them… Portainer (plus Portainer Agent on all the different hosts) lets you manage deployment across everything from one central UI. That plus Watchtower on all your hosts to keep all your containers fresh and up to date, and Pushover to send you push notifications as updates are happening… it’s pure magic.
Just a side question, what are pros of having docker around on various hosts compared with having one dedicated docker host?
As I said, I’m kind of a mess. I added containers while adding devices so segregating wasn’t necessarily my intention. That said, I will most likely keep DNS and DHCP on a single dedicated device. That, for some reason, makes sense to me. The rest I may move together except for the vpn services. I will run the 2 on different devices in case one service gets blocked by the external network I’m trying to connect from. I already ran into this once where WireGuard got blocked but OpenVPN did not.
In hindsight maybe not a ton, but my thinking going into it was that if one container were to get compromised, the attacker would find less other stuff on each host. So the most logical way I could see to segregate my services was by purpose (media, productivity, bitcoin etc)
I need to be better about my docker deployment. Services running on 3 devices. Some docker, some docker-compose, and some were setup in portainer. It’s a bit of a mess tbh. Portainer agent sounds promising. I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Much more to learn…
I’ve been at this for over a decade and there’s always more to learn! If you haven’t checked out docker-compose yet, that’s your next step. It allows you to script container setups :) I have 5 compose files based on categories (pirating, media servers, admin, etc…) and a shell script to launch them if I want to install them all, otherwise I just call the specific compose file. I can have all my apps up and running on a new server in about 10 minutes. Docker is awesome when it works well.