I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

  1. What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
  2. What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
  3. What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
  • @xantoxisEnglish
    10•1 month ago

    Podman is not yet ready for mainstream, in my experience

    My experience varies wildly from yours, so please don’t take this bit as gospel.

    Have yet to find a container that doesn’t work perfectly well in podman. The options may not be the same. Most issues I’ve found with running containers boil down to things that would be equally a problem in docker. A sample:

    • “rootless” containers are hard to configure. It can almost always be fixed with “–privileged” or some combination of permission flags. This would be equally true for docker; the only meaningful difference is podman tries to push everything into rootless. You don’t have to.
    • network filesystems cause headaches, especially smbfs + sqlite app. I’ve had to use NFS or ext4 inside a network-mounted image for some apps. This problem is identical for docker.
    • container networking–for specific cases–needs to managed carefully. These cases are identical for docker.

    And that’s it. I generally run things once from the podman command line, then use podlet to create a quadlet out of that configuration, something you can’t do with docker. If you are having any trouble with running containers under podman, try the --privileged shortcut, see that it works, and then double back if you think you really need rootless.