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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I definitely feel the lab burnout, but I feel like Docker is kind of the solution for me… I know how docker works, its pretty much set and forget, and ideally its totally reproducible. Docker Compose files are pretty much self-documenting.

    Random GUI apps end up being waaaay harder to maintain because I have to remember “how do I get to the settings? How did I have this configured? What port was this even on? How do I back up these settings?” Rather than a couple text config files in a git repo. It’s also much easier to revert to a working version if I try to update a docker container and fail or get tired of trying to fix it.




  • You’re arguing two different points here. “A VPN can act as a proxy” and “A VPN that only acts as a proxy is no longer a VPN”. I agree with the former and disagree with the latter.

    A “real” host-to-network VPN could be used as a proxy by just setting your default route through it, just like a simple host-to-host VPN could be NOT a proxy by only allowing internal IPs over the link. Would the latter example stop being a VPN if you add a default route going from one host to the other?


  • Fundamentally, a host-to-host VPN is still a VPN. It creates an encapsulated L2/L3 link between two points over another network. The number of hosts on either end doesn’t change that. Each end still has its own own interface address, subnet, etcetera. You could use the exact same VPN config for both a host-to-host and host-to-site VPN simply by making one of the hosts a router.

    I see your point about advocating for other methods where appropriate (although personally I prefer VPNs) but I think that gatekeeping the word “VPN” is silly.


  • “It has effectively the same function as a proxy” isn’t the same thing as “it’s not actually a VPN”.

    One could argue you’re not really using the tech to its fullest advantage, but the underlying tech is still a VPN. It’s just a VPN that’s being used as a proxy. You’re still using the same VPN protocols that could be used in production for conventional site-to-site or host-to-network VPN configurations.

    Regardless, you’re the one who brought up commercial VPNs; when using OpenVPN to create a tunnel between a VPS and home server(s), it seems like it’s being used exactly to “create private communication between multiple clients”. Even by your definition that should be a VPN, right?




  • If there’s a port you want accessible from the host/other containers but not beyond the host, consider using the expose directive instead of ports. As an added bonus, you don’t need to come up with arbitrary ports to assign on the host for every container with a shared port.

    IMO its more intuitive to connect to a service via container_name:443 instead of localhost:8443