I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.

It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.

I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?

  • OutcideEnglish
    20•1 year ago

    Another old school sysadmin that “retired” in the early 2010s.

    Yes, use docker-compose. It’s utterly worth it.

    I was intensely irritated at first that all of my old troubleshooting tools were harder to use and just generally didn’t trust it for ages, but after 5 years I wouldn’t be without.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•1 year ago

      I’m a little younger but in the same boat. There is some friction having filesystems, ports and processes “hidden” from your hosts programs that you typically rely on. But I needed them sooooo much less now that all my services are in Docker with exactly matching dependencies instead of rolling my eyes about running two PostgreSQL servers in different versions or juggling Python / node / Ruby versions with ASDF.

      • OutcideEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Yeah, so worth it! The first time I moved a service to a new box and realised all I had to do was copy the compose file and docker-compose up -d … I was sold.

        Now I’m moving everything to Docker Swarm which is a new adventure. :-)