Maybe I misunderstood - The “NixOS (bare metal)” seemed to imply to me that the containers were not bare-metal by omission. If not then my complaint is retracted.

I’ll die on this hill.

Containers run on “bare metal” in the same way that other processes on your system run.

Is this useful? They’re started but doing absolutely nothing. Who cares? You need to plan for max usage not idle.

My forgejo instance running right now is using 1070MiB. That’s way off your 173MB.

2.5’ hdd but besides running tight on space

No wonder - that’s huge! (sorry - couldn’t resist)

While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID

At these sizes you may want to consider it - at least a mirror (RAID1). That’s a lot of data to lose and/or have to fetch from backups. Being able to limp along until you get a replacement is an enormous time-saver.

Underrated comment.

A “howto” that just gives you scripts and commands to run is pointless. You need to understand the technology, and networking in particular.

2Gig on S3 (in us-east-1) is like $0.05/mo. and is enough for either Nextcloud or Immich. Your data is going to be the largest consumer of space.

Things like Immich or Nextcloud are far too much for what I need, I basically just need a password-protected upload interface and the ability to grab the direct links to the images to embed them.

Why do you care that they do things you don’t need if they also do what you need?

Because these do just what you need and do it well.

Unless you have a specific need there is no reason. So long as the domain resolves then you’re probably good. I use AWS so I can easily update the IP since I have a dynamic IP address. Some may use Cloudflare because it’s necessary to use other services or because there’s a ‘free’ option or something? I’m really not sure - I’m not familiar with Cloudflare but I see lots of people using their low-end free services for things.

The tutorials I’d been looking at were showing them overriding the DNS servers at the domain registrar with servers from Cloudflare or elsewhere. Is that just because there may not be an automated way to update the IP dynamically with the domain registrar, but there is for Cloudflare?

Probably because those tutorials are using Cloudflare for DNS services. I actually use Amazon AWS Route53 for my domain (purchased through 123cheapdomains (yes - really)) and I update it through the AWS APIs with a small script.

I was curious what distro you folks might recommend for this purpose.

This is a bit like going to an automotive forum and asking “what’s the best car to buy”. You’re going to get a lot of “I’m running <blank>” and people telling you their preferences, which is NOT the answer to your question. The answer to your question is that literally any of them would be fine for your purposes. If you’re happy with Bazzite then stick with Bazzite. There’s no reason to switch.

If I have to manage it entirely by command line, it will take 10 times longer for me to do anything I want to do, and I’d really prefer a GUI.

Then use a GUI. The extra memory used is trivial and your system will be way over-powered for a reverse proxy to a home network anyway. In Linux land there’s really no such thing as a “server distro” and a “desktop distro” for the most part. I use Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora as servers. They can all have desktops on them too.

You may find, however, that as you manage more than one system it becomes tiresome/tedious to have to use RDP for remote administration and may start learning the CLI over time. Especially since it’s often a lot easier to give somebody a list of commands to run on a forum than to say “open your network manager, which is different on Gnome from KDE, click the button that says…”.

I need something that can sit there without updating until I tell it to

Are you going to update frequently? You want to be sure you’re keeping security patches up-to-date. Auto-patching can be very good unless you have the discipline to keep up with it.

I need a domain for that, and a lot of tutorials just skip on past this step in the domain configuration screens where you “enter your DNS servers” as though I know why I’d need other DNS servers,

You’ve got a bit of reading on how DNS works. But basically there are “root DNS servers” that everybody knows by IP address that then know about other DNS servers by IP and forward traffic to them to resolve names. When you register a domain you are asking one of those DNS providers to resolve your hostname to your IP address. You can see this a bit by running dig +trace some.host.name and it will show the requests made. Your DNS servers would be the ones where you register your domain.

BUT your IP address may change. So you generally need a way to update it if it does. There are providers like dyndns.org and others (search for dynamic domain service or something) that will give you a sub-domain for free/cheap and tools to auto-update it. Something like “mysite.dyndns.org”.

Same, though recently I’ve been using httpie which gives a bit of a cleaner cli.

https://httpie.io/cli

“I only run artisanal applications built using vi without any plugins”

Npm is a fucking mess…

When that data resides on a third-party SaaS platform, I am trusting their security architecture — which I cannot audit, cannot verify, and cannot modify.

And which was designed by and is operated by dedicated teams of professionals.

Which you are not.

Which would you find easier to explain to a judge - that your client data was part of a larger Google breech and attack or that your bespoke home grown system was misconfigured?

Yeah, “built on ipfs” is a decent red flag.

🤣

Yeah - alt.binaries never worked.

It’s also text-based by design. You can’t upload media directly. If someone wants to share media, they have to link to an external host and the UI just embeds it.

Kids still learning about base64 encoding.

12 pages of detailed documentation

Home Gamer: Is this it?

…it answers from the attached KBs only. If the fact isn’t there, it tells you - explicitly - instead of winging it.

So you’ve made a FAQ with a LLM interface? I could see that potentially being useful for cooperate “let our bot answer your questions” tools.

But the usefulness of AI isn’t just in “tell me a fact”. Like what would your AI give for "what functions would I use in Python to convert a utf16 string to utf8? Would the answer need to be in the KB already?

Non-containerized applications. Not in a container. It’s not complicated. Running “on bare metal” sounds cool but it’s a wildly inaccurate description. Containerized applications run on the system natively just like non-containerized applications. So if one of them runs “on bare metal” then then others do as well.

But historically “on bare metal” is used for embedded or micro-controllers where you don’t have an OS.