On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 4:14 PM Jim Anderson <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm really unclear on what this gets you vs. just leaving LaddieAlpha
> running in a screen session or whatnot.
>

As a pretty old school UNIX guy myself, it took me quite a long while to
warm up to the benefits of containerization.  In the specific case of
LaddieAlpha, an apparently closed source (?) binary blob that requires a
heavy runtime I don't want installed, stuffing the whole thing into a
container as a sandbox assures me that it is wholly and entirely unable to
affect anything outside the container and the directory I give it.  I do
this with nearly all of the user-facing services that run on the household
server.  A problem with any one service is, through the magic of cgroups,
unable to affect any of the others, or the host node itself.  You could
accomplish some of the same benefits with a chroot or something like a BSD
jail.  Docker's just dead easy to use for the use case.

This is getting pretty far off topic, but if you're curious about how this
approach to running services on Linux works for me, feel free to reach out
off-list.  As an opinionated Unix sysadmin of the old school, I'm always
happy to rant about the "right" way to do things.

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