Hrmm due to filling up my database allocation I have had to increase my Masto

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@wishy @ben @dtl my main mental obstacle is the “getting it working” and then the “keeping it working”

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@bloor @wishy @dtl Admittedly I run it in docker so don't have to worry about deps, But I've found it far lower maintenance than I was expecting.

The getting it going bit was a bit more effort though

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@ben @wishy @dtl see .. I have never used docker and have no idea how to use it or even really what it’s for…

[wishy@tooter.wishy.co.uk]

@bloor @ben @dtl you'd need to learn about 5 commands to manage the service through docker. It's been remarkably pain free tbh

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl

I am self-hosted, on an N100 Intel NUC.

I am not using docker.

I do not do anything fancy to keep it going (and it gets a fair workout :)).

It is not the most trivial installation, but not is it too bad.

[steve@mastodon.nexusuk.org]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl I believe Docker is for a similar purpose to AutoTools. I.e. to make simple stuff go wrong in complex un-debuggable ways.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl

I am more than happy to go through it with you remotely at some point, should you wish!

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@bloor @wishy @dtl

fair. Easiest way to think of it is a small prebuilt vm image but without a kernel and (usually) designed to run a single app.

Running a docker container is generally easy, but troubleshooting docker issues can be a pain (though rarely needed IME), so I guess a native install might end up being less burden if you're not already doing that anyway

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@neil @ben @wishy @dtl thank you, I may very well take you up on that, I think I need to try and get my “basic requirements” in order first though, perhaps a machine or a virtual machine, nice and clean and ready

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@ben @wishy @dtl why not just use a VM?

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl

Sure!

Personally, I am not using a VM, although there may be some value to that. I dedicated the whole machine to Mastodon, but then I, erm, use it rather a lot!

So just a normal Debian installation for me.

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@bloor @wishy @dtl The answer to that depends a bit on exact needs, but

Scalability - I can run far more containers than I can VMs because containers don't usually bring userspace and kernel overhead

Ease of deployment: containers ship with all their deps in there, so there's no screwing about with dep hell (or incompatible deps being required by different apps). That also makes support easier if you're shipping

upgrades are also much easier - you just change the tag and pull the new image.

[wishy@tooter.wishy.co.uk]

@steve @bloor @ben @dtl in the case of masto, I would say the ruby setup is a bit of a pain. Docker just gives you a pre built image which largely just works

[dtl@8bitorbust.info]

@bloor @ben @wishy @neil I'm interested in how you keep it segmented from the rest of your network.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@dtl @bloor @ben @wishy

It is on its own VLAN, plus ingress and egress firewalling.

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@dtl @ben @wishy @neil separate IP block, separate VLAN maybe separate machine or maybe different VLANs to different VMs

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@neil @dtl @bloor @wishy Similar here, it's in its own segment - my firewall has multiple NICs so hangs off one of those.

I gave that segment its own IPv6 subnet, so if there ever was an issue, I'll be able to see at a glance whether it was our LAN or the masto box (less so for ipv4 though because NAT)

[steve@mastodon.nexusuk.org]

@wishy @bloor @ben @dtl I am put off by Docker because even though set up is easier, when it goes wrong I find it so much harder to debug. I use 2 Docker things (VWsFriend and HomeAssistant) and I pray they never break!

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@steve @wishy @bloor @dtl Yeah that's fair

I remember nearly going to war with engineering because they wanted to start shipping software to us (ops) as docker images solely because it made deployment easier for them.

I get on very well with containers nowadays (didnt have much choice when I started owning a SaaS product running on k8s), but (if I was still there) I think I'd still make the same arguments against them driving the CDN

[srtcd424@mas.to]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl sadly docker is probably the worst implementation of the container concept, but it useful in the modern world, even if it shouldn't be. podman is saner in many respects. It's also worth playing with "full system" containers via e.g. systemd-nspawn - they might make more sense if you're used to VMs, and it uses the same kernel features as application containers, so it's a good way of getting experience with those.