I’ve been maintaining multiple release channels for most of my projects. I always have a nightly build and a dev build that I run manually or on every push. Actually versioned releases either happen directly after completing a milestone or when the release schedule calls for it.

Maybe I’m just old, but I thought a distribution is literally just a package delivery basically, just like you speculated. Making software work together nicely is actually already hard enough IMO. I don’t think anything is wrong. Valid question though

How do you sell what you did as “it just worked”? Rightaway? You lied to them. You have your coworkers on an unmanaged machine with a foreign OS on the guest WiFi with custom networking. Don’t oversell a workaround as a solution.

Simplifying the problem to “Windows” seems unfair, given how many problems you found. All of them still require a long-term solution for regular operation.

Reddit is free. Other people paying for your free service is a very weak argument to bring up. If Lemmy dies today, nobody but hobbyists and amateurs will care. Just like with LE.

I’ve been there. Not every CA is equal. Those kind of CAs were shit. LE is convenient. There are more options though.

I actually agree. For the majority of sites and/or use cases, it probably is sufficient.

Explaining properly why LE is generally problematic, takes considerable depth of information, that I’m just not able to relay easily right now. But consider this:

LE is mostly a convenience. They save an operator $1 per month per certificate. For everyone with hosting costs beyond $1000, this is laughable savings. People who take TLS seriously often have more demands than “padlock in the browser UI”. If a free service decides they no longer want to use OCSP, that’s an annoying disruption that was entirely not worth the $1 https://www.abetterinternet.org/post/replacing-ocsp-with-crls/

LE has no SLA. You have no guarantee to be able to ever renew your certificate again. A risk not anyone should take.

Who is paying for LE? If you’re not paying, how can you rely on the service to exist tomorrow?

It’s not too long ago that people said “only some sites need HTTPS, HTTP is fine for most”. It never was, and people should not build anything relevant on “free” security today either.

People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It’s a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.

If you have never revoked a certificate, you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don’t know what you’re doing.

LE works until it doesn’t, and then it’s like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it’s not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that’s not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this “free” garbage. The fanboys will never die off

Sharing the network space with another container is the way to go IMHO. I use podman and just run the main application in one container, and then another VPN-enabling container in the same pod, which is essentially what you’re achieving with with the network_mode: container:foo directive.

Ideally, exposing ports on the host node is not part of your design, so don’t have any --port directives at all. Your host should allow routing to the hosted containers and, thus, their exposed ports. If you run your workloads in a dedicated network, like 10.0.1.0/24, then those addresses assigned to your containers need to be addressable. Then you just reach all of their exposed ports directly. Ultimately, you then want to control port exposure through services like firewalld, but that can usually be delayed. Just remember that port forwarding is not a security mechanism, it’s a convenience mechanism.

If you want DLNA, forget about running that workload in a “proper” container. For DLNA, you need the ability to open random UDP ports for communication with consuming devices on the LAN. This will always require host networking.

Your DLNA-enabled workloads, like Plex, or Jellyfin, need a host networking container. Your services that require internet privacy, like qBittorrent, need their own, dedicated pod, on a dedicated network, with another container that controls their networking plane to redirect communication to the VPN. Ideally, all your manual configuration then ends up with a directive in the Wireguard config like:

PostUp = ip route add 192.168.1.0/24 via 192.168.19.1 dev eth0

Wireguard will likely, by default, route all traffic through the wg0 device. You just then tell it that the LAN CIDR is reachable through eth0 directly. This enables your communication path to the VPN-secured container after the VPN is up.