this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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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?

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[–] DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago (7 children)

I hate it very much. I am sure it is due to my limited understanding of it, but I've been stuck on some things that were very easy for me using VM.

We have two networks, one of which has very limited internet connectivity, behind proxy. When using VMs, I used to configure everything: code, files, settings on a machine with no restrictions; shut it down; move the VM files to the restricted network; boot and be happily on my way.

I'm unable to make this work with docker. Getting my Ubuntu server fetch its updates behind proxy is easy enough; setting it for python Pip is another level; realising the specific python libraries need special keys to work around proxies is yet another; figuring out how to get it done for Docker and python under it is when I gave up. Why can it not be as simple as the VM!

Maybe I'm not looking using the right terms or maybe I should go and learn docker "properly", but there is no doubt that using Docker is much more difficult for my use case than using VMs.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Huh? Your docker container shouldn't be calling pip for updates at runtime, you should consider a container immutable and ephemeral. Stop thinking about it as a mini VM. Build your container (presumably pip-ing in all the libraries you require) on the machine with full network access, then export or publish the container image and run it on the machine with limited access. If you want updates, you regularly rebuild the container image and repeat.

Alternatively, even at build time it's fairly easy to use a proxy with docker, unless you have some weird proxy configuration. I use it here so that updates get pulled from a local caching proxy, reducing my internet traffic and making rebuilds quicker.

[–] DontNoodles@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago

I think I'm not aware of the exporting/publishing part and that's the cause of my woes. I get everything running on the machine with unrestricted access, move to the machine with restricted access go "docker compose up" and get stuck. I'll read up on exporting/publishing, thank you.

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