Wonder what distro I should use if I set up a libvirt system instead.

Should be something stable but I dunno how sensitive virtualization is to age.

Like CentOS, sure it's probably nice and stable, but how much did one miss out on by having your hypervisors stuck on CentOS 7 from 2014 until quite recently.

@quad Definitely do not go with CentOS.

Alpine would be nice, I'm sure, but the lack of glibc may end up breaking stuff (or maybe not).

Hmm... Why not Ubuntu LTS?

@L1Cafe Ubuntu LTS seems sensible, but I just kind of hate Ubuntu because of Canonical. 18.04 switching to netplan was the final nail in the coffin and from then on I kind of just quit running Ubuntu on servers unless Debian was too outdated for things to function.

@quad @L1Cafe I like Debian.

@tk @L1Cafe Debian is pretty chill on servers.

Though in today's "agile" (bleh) software environment many things don't work or are too fiddly to get working on Debian

@quad @L1Cafe I thought "agile" usually included Docker these days.

@tk @quad Anything can indeed be agile if you install Docker. Docker is a blessing for me, honestly. I run tens of services, and I don't have to worry about manually updating them (through apt, yum, dnf, or else) anymore. I just have an Ansible playbook that shuts the Docker machines down while keeping the volumes intact, and fetches the latest Docker image from hub.docker.com, while reconnecting them to their volumes and starting all of them up.

It's pure bliss.

@L1Cafe @tk Docker is easy but it feels like such a god damn overkill solution to just keeping my server software updated.

i support containerization for quick deployment of test environments, temporary applications and isolation of certain components. But I absolutely despise seeing docker pretty much being used as a package manager

@quad @tk I think it adds a lot of stability, reproducibility, and security to a prod deployment.

For example, my Docker "master node" has like 3 or 4 networks that are isolated from each other, and allow services like MariaDB and such to talk to other servers. This way, all my databases are isolated from each other, and if a web service contains a vulnerability that allows the attacker to dump the databases, they won't see much from the other ones.

@L1Cafe @tk If you're using docker properly then yes.

What I hate is when instead of setting up software someone just pulls 20 docker containers to run Plex, SickRage, CouchPotato, Deluge and whatnot on their home server.

That's just Docker being used as a glorified package manager.

@quad @L1Cafe @tk No one has ever used Docker properly, not once.

@crunklord420 @L1Cafe @tk You mean how in theory every time you launch an application a temporary stateless container that only has access to the exact files and resources it needs would be started and then nuked completely once you close the application?

Yes, security-wise that is generally considered the end goal of containerization.