After months of dealing with oddly written software in my home lab, I’ve finally jumped on to the container bandwagon. OK OK I know, I’m about 9 years late on this. At work I had looked in to running Docker on Windows but it wasn’t very beneficial for the Windows platform since the images were huge and trying to access SMB shares would have been super difficult, so my excitement about Docker died there.
In my home lab, I had I wanted to install an application that only had two methods of installation. I could either use Docker… which I didn’t really know much about or I can use the “Snap” install. Being that I was running Debian, I elected to go for the snap install. What I didn’t know at the time that while that version that snap installed was current, it wasn’t going to be current for long. Eventually the app started yelling that it had an update, but I wasn’t going to be able to update it via snap, as the package wasn’t really being maintained. Then enters Docker. I maybe waited a couple of months for the snap package to get updated and then finally gave up. I installed Docker and hit Microsoft Copilot with a couple questions about how to get a docker container running and have it run automatically at boot. Copilot started me off with a docker-compose.yaml file and I ran from there. I decided to create a directory called /opt/docker and dumped my docker-compose file there. Then I created an /opt/docker/<app-name> directory and moved all of the data and config files from the original app to that directory and configured the docker-compose file to mount the respective sub directories to their counter parts within the container image. I stopped the original install and then started up docker compose. BAM. My app was updated to the latest version and everything was working as well as it was before.
This led me to converted all of my other open source apps to using Docker compose using the same directory setup so that I’d know where the config files for all of my apps were rather than the weird location some of them would get placed. I also added a service to the Docker compose file so that it’d launch an app called watchtower that would look for updates to my images and automatically updated them. It’s been great and has helped maintain a heavily used part of my home lab.
Lately TikTok has been trying to teach me COBOL, which I found interesting and first and actually thought maybe I’d give it a try. While I was thinking of old programming languages that few people admit to writing these days, I was reminded of the MUMPS programming language that I was supposed to learn when I was in college. So I decided to return to trying to figure that out. In college, I managed to get through the class, but I could never really wrap my head around the language. After spending just a couple nights playing around with it, it hasn’t been too bad to use. I’d say its a little quirky, but I think that has to do with it originating in the 60s. I’ve actually had some fun playing with it. I even wrote a fake “Patient Information System”… So really, its a not so glorified address book lol
When I wanted to start looking at MUMPS I decided I didn’t want to have to install a bunch of dependencies for it and since it doesn’t have a package available I opted to try to install Dr. Kevin O’Kane’s version in a Docker image. I figured that’d make it a little more portable and its worked pretty well. See my MUMPS page if you want to get a hold of those images.
Well, that’s all I have for today, have a good one all.