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This is why I like docker for the personal servers I run - compose file pointer to a pinned docker file on a nas and boom: pihole, dns,dhcp, Emby, ddns, hass, w

This is why I like docker for the personal servers I run - compose file pointer to a pinned docker file on a nas and boom: pihole, dns,dhcp, Emby, ddns, hass, whatever - easy to backup, view/edit and stable. Used to run everything as a service and it was never this easy. Not that this says anything about running your own code, but abstracting away everyone else’s multitude of deps and configs is pretty neat!

Silhouette 6y ago
What amazes me is that in 2021, the big server/desktop OSes still don't use this kind of set-up as standard. Shouldn't the norm today be each service or application running in some controlled and sandboxed environment, at a specific version of the software, with access to system resources and networking explicitly specified, and with everything other than deliberately persistent resources disposable if you want to update to a new version or remove some software from your system entirely? It seems like this would solve all kinds of long-standing problems with security, privacy, system stability, etc. Tools like Docker might still be useful for portability even in that environment, for example if you were developing on one OS and running production on another. However, it feels like packaging/installing/updating all applications and services could be similar to how we build and manage lightweight containers/jails/VMs as developers/sysadmins. Install a package, then provide access to networking and storage and other local or remote resources as appropriate for each case. There could still be user-friendly interfaces and app stores and all that stuff on top for non-geeks to install and update things or see what is happening if they want to. The OS and application developers could provide sensible defaults that would probably work in almost all cases for "normal" users anyway, so most of the time I wouldn't expect an average user to really be aware of what was happening under the surface. However, it seems crazy to me that here we are with all this modern technology and we can still have basic questions about what is actually running on our laptop or even a production server, and where it came from, and how up to date it is, and whether anything still needs it to be there anyway, and whether it's secretly encrypting our files for ransom or spying on us using our webcam and uploading the footage or just nuking yesterday's work document because our favourite game's save code had a bug and overwrote a file in the wrong place.
- dheera 6y ago
  It also really surprises me that in 2021 we have L4 self-driving cars but not L4 self-installing software that can figure out how to run itself. You'd think the latter to be much easier but even NVIDIA's own stuff horribly fails.

Silhouette 6y ago

What amazes me is that in 2021, the big server/desktop OSes still don't use this kind of set-up as standard. Shouldn't the norm today be each service or application running in some controlled and sandboxed environment, at a specific version of the software, with access to system resources and networking explicitly specified, and with everything other than deliberately persistent resources disposable if you want to update to a new version or remove some software from your system entirely? It seems like this would solve all kinds of long-standing problems with security, privacy, system stability, etc. Tools like Docker might still be useful for portability even in that environment, for example if you were developing on one OS and running production on another. However, it feels like packaging/installing/updating all applications and services could be similar to how we build and manage lightweight containers/jails/VMs as developers/sysadmins. Install a package, then provide access to networking and storage and other local or remote resources as appropriate for each case. There could still be user-friendly interfaces and app stores and all that stuff on top for non-geeks to install and update things or see what is happening if they want to. The OS and application developers could provide sensible defaults that would probably work in almost all cases for "normal" users anyway, so most of the time I wouldn't expect an average user to really be aware of what was happening under the surface. However, it seems crazy to me that here we are with all this modern technology and we can still have basic questions about what is actually running on our laptop or even a production server, and where it came from, and how up to date it is, and whether anything still needs it to be there anyway, and whether it's secretly encrypting our files for ransom or spying on us using our webcam and uploading the footage or just nuking yesterday's work document because our favourite game's save code had a bug and overwrote a file in the wrong place.

dheera 6y ago
It also really surprises me that in 2021 we have L4 self-driving cars but not L4 self-installing software that can figure out how to run itself. You'd think the latter to be much easier but even NVIDIA's own stuff horribly fails.