I guess I’m a dummy, because I never even thought about this. Maybe I got lucky, but when I did restore from a backup, I didn’t have any issues. My containerized services came right back up like nothing was wrong. Though that may have been right before I successfully hosted my own (now defunct) Lemmy instance. I can’t remember, but I think I only had sqlite databases in my services at the time.

I use it most days, even as a PC/web browser connected to my TV. I play any classic games or anything not graphically intensive on it. Anything with a medium-level of graphical intensity I’ll use moonlight to stream from my desktop in the next room over. If it’s a particularly beautiful game, I’ll play it on my gaming PC directly, since I have a really nice OLED monitor hooked up to it directly.

Mine are named after fictional robots, computer programs, or AI. It started with my wifi being GLaDOS for 5 GHz and Wheatley for 2.4 GHz. I thought it was funny that everyone could immediately tell that Wheatley was the slower one. Over time, I continued the trend. My gaming PCs are named after characters from the Mega Man X series (desktop is Zero, laptop is X, steam deck is Sigma). My macs are named EVE and WALL-E. My server is named Sibyl System (from Psycho Pass).

This is an excellent use case for a self hosted service, since location data is frequently used for nefarious purposes.

I have a mesh system made up of Asus Zenwifi ET8s, and I have been very happy with them. They have a lot of cool features, such as having a VPN server and VPN client, with the VPN client allowing me to apply the VPN to only selected devices. It has tons of customization options for those that are knowledgeable about that sort of thing. For example, I can tweak at what signal strength AP steering happens. It has WiFi 6E and 2.5 Gbps wired backhaul.

When I first got it, it was very buggy, and some features straight up didn’t work. But they eventually got all the bugs that I found fixed. It’s in a really good state right now.

To address your desired features, it does have wireguard. I don’t know about DDNS, but it does not have pihole built in. It has adguard built in, but it doesn’t really seem to do much, tbh. Then again, pihole didn’t really do anything for me either. I ended up shutting off my pihole because I didn’t even notice a difference.

As a podman user myself, they’re essentially the same. I look at the docker documentation when learning new things about podman. 99.9% of the time, it’s exactly the same. For the features that aren’t in podman, you can use the podman-docker package. This gets you a daemon so you can have some docker-specific features such as a container being able to start/stop other containers by mounting the socket as a volume, and it allows you to use docker-compose.

That package actually does a bit more than that! If you don’t need all the extras, then I say just add the alias and be done with it.

Wow, that’s really clever. And dead simple at the same time.

I like podman because rootless and daemonless are built-in and default. Yes, it can be done on docker, but you have to do a bunch of shit to get it set up.

You could create the alias alias docker="podman" and 99% of the time, you won’t even be able to tell the difference since podman is a docker drop in replacement. All the docker documentation applies to podman as well. But since docker runs as root by default, some edge cases might not work out of the box (like binding to a port on the host less than 1000).

Podman comes with some neat tools like being able to create systemd service files to start and stop containers as services.

To use docker-compose, you’ll need some additional packages. That’s probably the biggest drawback to podman imo. Podman wants to use pods instead of docker-compose, but I think they gotta take their heads out of their asses and just support the more popular format on that one. Not to mention docker-compose is just plain better imo. Easier to define, easier to understand, easier to modify. The list goes on and on.

I used this guide and it worked perfect for me:

https://b-woody.com/posts/2022-05-12-pihole-on-a-rootless-podman-container/

I’m a podman user, but what’s the point of using podman if you are going to use a daemon and run it as root? I like podman so I can specifically avoid those things.

I have it plugged into my TV via dock and use it to watch illegal video streams from sketchy websites that don’t have apps. Most often they are live sports streams.

Yes! This worked! Thank you!

But then I wouldn’t be able to see photos on my instance. I want to see them, I just don’t want the federated cache being saved on my SSD.

That’s fine with me, as I’m the only user in my instance.

Though I do still think this is a huge miss on pictrs to not allow the admin to browse the photos stored on their own server. I mean, someone could upload an illegal photo, not post it, then send the URL that only they could possibly know to whichever relevant government agency anonymously and potentially ruin the life of the admin.

Thank you so much for contributing and making this much needed fix.

I actually thought of that. And it’s even hosted on sh.itjust.works via pictrs.

Awesome! Thank you for this link!

I agree! Or let us disable caching images from other instances. I’m not interested at all in rehosting images that other users on other instances upload. That’s too much of a legal liability to me.