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Motivation Docker recently updated its terms making the Docker Desktop for macOS and Windows free only for personal use. Any business with more than 250 employees or more than $10 million annual revenue needs to buy its Docker Business subscription. For me, the Docker Desktop was already a hit and a miss. It was great when it worked but a pain to troubleshoot when it did not. Also, it does not bode well when they make software based on open source tools paid after it was free for a long time. Now is the time to find an alternative for this. ...

I have written before about how I have used Tailscale, a magical tool to set up Wireguard tunnels to create an overlay network called Tailnets. I have also written about how I host all of my services to be publically accessible using Cloudflare Tunnels (fka Argo Tunnels). But I recently discovered that the ~20MiB binary of cloudflared can do a lot more than just run tunnels. Here is how I used most of the newly discovered features. ...

Photon OS is an open-source minimalist Linux operating system from VMware, highly optimized for container workloads. Crazy fast How optimized is it, you ask? The minimal image weighs in at a tiny 470MiB, installs in 20 seconds, uses less than 1GiB of disk space after install, boots in 10 seconds (including the GRUB wait time!), and consumes less than 150MiB RAM after boot. It cannot get better than that (maybe VMware surprises me in the next release!). ...

Requirement for High Availability In the previous post , I talked about how I use Pi-hole for my DNS resolution. DNS is the core component for the internet to work, so if I were to be patching or rebooting the host running Pi-hole, no devices in my home network would be able to use the internet. A simple fix would be to run two separate hosts with Pi-hole, like another Raspberry Pi Zero. But, in both Windows and Linux based operating systems, I’ve seen issues where the time to switch to the secondary DNS when the primary goes down is a lot, and it leaves with a gap in time where the internet is still down for the end user. ...

What is Pi-hole? Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole, used as a network-wide DNS level ad and malware blocker that works with domain blocklists and enforces it. The idea here is simple, you point it to blocklists that are available on the internet (it comes with one pre-enabled), and it takes care of preventing any of your devices from trying to reach those domains. Common examples are activity tracking websites and malware domains that should never be contacted. ...