Hello everyone New to Linux, new to self hosting, and struggling a bit but making progress.

I have two questions: 1 Is there a YouTube channel or a website with tutorials and explanations for the dummies like me? Something eli5 with easy words to start with and understand the basics.

2 I see a lot about nginx and reverse proxy and not sure I need it. I want to run a couple apps on my local network to be able to access it on any computer inside the house and, for now, nowhere else. Do I need nginx? What about port security? I’m worried my lack of understanding regarding ports would make my home network vulnerable. But since for now I only use 192.168.1 , i’d say I’m safe from intruders?

I acknowledge it’s all surely basic but I’m not sure where to find a comprehensive source of learning instead of googling bits and pieces.

Thanks

  • @PriorProject
    2•1 year ago

    is it worth starting out with podman or is this just some job requirement and docker is perfectly fine for us hobbyists

    I’m doing this in my homelab, but I am a pro and so time spent learning arcane details of container ecosystems is not precisely wasted time for me. But I’m not doing it directly for some particular professional requirement, it’s more curiosity.

    Based on my experience, I don’t think I could honestly recommend podman right now for a beginner. The people that tend to be most interested in podman tend to think:

    • The best days of docker are behind it. The company hasn’t achieved financial success and are going to make it worse over time to pressure companies into paying them. We’ve seen the start of this with docker-desktop but I’m predicting it will continue and escalate.
    • Docker was the first really successful container system and is very monolithic and full of questionable technical decisions. Improving it will be hard because of its success, and also because its monolithic nature means that many changes will bottleneck at docker the company, who as noted is not incentivized to make its open source stuff “too good” such that companies use it without paying.

    Podman is more modular, is supported by more successful and stable companies can have revenue strategies that don’t require them to monetize podman specifically to death, and the individual pieces are small enough to be built and supported by individuals and non-commercial teams if necessary. So I’m sort of betting that over time podman will gain more traction and am willing to invest in learning my way through some bumps in the road as that happens. For beginners, I think you’ll know it’s time to consider a switch when projects start to ship podman configs instead of docker-compose configs. Then you’ll know that those devs think that supporting podman deployments will give them less headaches than supporting docker deployments and we’re reaching the inflection point where podman is starting to “win” and legit be easier/better. Right now I’m pretty clearly swimming upstream and I’m ok with that.

    But relating back to OP’s question, although my usage of podman is a bit bleeding edge… it still illustrates the kind of problems every self-hoster hits and how it’s necessary to break those problems down into smaller parts to solve them yourself. It’s just not realistic to expect every self-hosting scenario to be fully tutorialized. Tutorials help us understand how the pieces fit together, but when things go wrong we have to understand the pieces and troubleshoot them directly rather than expect the tutorial to dive into fractally complex subject in easy/brief overviews but simultaneously dive into infinitely many edge-cases in depth.