Rasberry Pi OS, Begone!

Last night, I tried to use a docker container on the new Pi system that I've been able to use on other systems without issue.

This experience was pretty much a nightmare.

I was able to install Docker without issue and the 'hello world' container worked fine.

When I tried to run a Wordpress container, there were cascading issues.  Granted, I know that the Pi runs on the ARM chipset, so I did have to make adjustments for that, which wasn't all that difficult.

The main issue I had probably related to the Pi OS.  There were things that the OS were blocking.

While I was able to get the Worpdress container to run, I couldn't connect to it intially.  In fact, I couldn't reach the internet, using curl or any other browser client.  Apparently, curl is kinda weird on the Pi OS, as it requires usage of port 80 and I'd tried to use port 80 as the Wordpress service port.  Since I wasn't using port 80 or any other service that was configured to use port 80, I initially felt it was safe to use port 80 for the Wordpress container.  NOPE!  When I did, it broke some things relating to curl and routing.  After ChatGPT informed me that it's best to not use port 80 for the Wordpress container, I changed the port to 8888 with no success.   It ended up taking me like 6 hours to determine the issue.  ChatGPT kept repeating repair steps that weren't working, until I forced it to look for other issues.

At 4 AM this morning, I finally was able to reach the container using curl, Chromium, and Firefox, but was still experiencing connection drops when trying to use Duckduckgo.  I also noticed several other connection drops (some Wordpress plugins requires backend callbacks to 'home' using curl - those started breaking again.

The fix was to remove some default routes that were associated with the containers.  I also had to remove some rules from IPTables.  I also had to remove some IP links, and also had to add additional config context to the wp.config.php and compose.yml files.

Later in the day, I checked the container again and noticed that the problem routes that I'd removed had been readded by Pi OS, reverting my work.

I got fed up and decided to start from scratch with another OS.  

I chose Ubuntu, since I'm already familiar with it.  The only wildcard is that this Pi system is still powered by ARM, so I might still run into some things that are currently unknown to me...I'll just have to be prepared for any chipset-related issues that may occur, but I trust Ubuntu more than Pi OS at this point.

Ubuntu 25.10 is installed on the system's internal SSD.  I used the Pi boot options to reinstall the OS...that's a cool option, but I wish it would also give the option to use wireless connections instead of ethernet, as I had to jump through hoops to ensure I could use the ethernet where the Pi system is currently located.

As well, I wasn't prepared for the new OS install to take 45 minutes.

As frustrated as I was, it's all a learning experience for me.  As well, there's less frustration in reinstalling when I'm using a Pi.

I'd post some of my ChatGPT session, but it was messy and an hours-long chat.

I'll keep you all updated on my progress with Ubuntu on the Pi.

UPDATE (1/2/2026):  Yeah, I already deployed a docker instance of Wordpress in Ubuntu, on the Pi.  I had none of the issues I had last night with deploying the same .yml file on the Pi OS, beyond another issue with changing code so that the images being pulled supported ARM.  The two experiences were very different.

UPDATE (1/3/2026):  I've still not noticed any issues.  All is well, I think!

Christmas Day 2025 - Received Rasberry Pi 500+ As A Gift!

Good day, all!

My family opened Christmas presents last night at 12 AM (most of us didn't want to wake up early to open presents).

I received a Rasberry Pi 500+ for Christmas - it was a gift from my daughter.

What spurred this interest?  I mean, I was never really curious about Rasberry Pi devices, as I've always had very robust computer systems in my household.  Only now am I hating all the systems sprawled about within my basement.  

My son received a Rasberry Pi 5 from my daughter in November and I got to see it (I'd never held or seen them prior to that).  He was able to configure it as a media server pretty much immediately after he got it.  I loved the small form factor, which spurred my interest.

Once I saw his, I went to Rasberry Pi to see the things they had.  I was immediately curious about the 500+ and had planned to get it on my own, but as my family uses Elfster.com to gift each other, I added it to my wish list.

The keyboard is NICE!  I love how it soft-clicks (it's a mechanical keyboard)...I've a Royal Kludge S98 and that thing is noisy AF compared to this.  I also love the 500+'s RGB setup of preconfigured keyboard configs.

This Pi seems to be powerful enough to where I'm considering using it as my main docker host, but my current docker host is an Alienware M17X R3, which I do not think the 500+ can match across the performance spectrum, but it is a great second choice.  The thing about the Alienware is that it is a laptop and has a functional battery, so if power hiccups or if I lose power, I can gracefully shut down that system.  Plus, that system is quite antiquated for a gaming system, so hosting docker containers is a good use for it.  

Where does this leave me with the 500+?  It means that I can shut down one of my older and less capable systems, which will declutter my office/lab.  

I can actually envision buying several of these to replace old systems.

Everything resides within the keyboard, which is why it is thick.  The system has a heatsink to dissipate heat - there are no fans, so the system stays quiet.

As this system comes with a 256 GB SSD drive, I did not have to muck with micro SD cards, although I've the option if I feel the need.  The SSD drive is preconfigured with the Rasberry Pi OS.  The SSD drive can also be replaced with something bigger - SSD drive replacements would need to use the M.2 NVMe format.

The system is BT- and Wifi-capable.  It has two mini-HDMI ports, and three USB-A ports (2 x v3 and 1 x v2).  It also has an ethernet port and 16 GB of memory.

I'll be sure to share my Pi journey here.

Containerized Nextcloud & Owncloud

I've been using Nextcloud for several years.  I prefer Owncloud but Owncloud, IMO, is pretty arcane.  The con for Nextcloud is that it feels heavy and is slow.

Nextcloud is a PITA to maintain via snaps in Ubuntu.  Something is always breaking or not working properly and most of those issues tend to be related to snaps.

I decided to try Nextcloud via containers.  I am very surprised - it feels light and quick in comparison to installing natively on HDD.  The host system has an SSD.  I deployed it via Portainer, but I had to butcher someone  else's docker compose YML file.  The file looks ugly but I've a running system.  This is my second attempt at deploying Nextcloud as a container - the first attempt had DB access issues that I was having a difficult time sorting.

Even when importing files (videos, pictures, and music) into Nextcloud, there was less of a system load.

For now, I'll monitor the system while using it with a small subset of data (it currently has 40 GB of files).  I don't want to spend the effort of moving a massive amount of files only for the instance to die (I do have persistent volumes enabled for the container, though).  The app container is consuming 4 GB of memory, though - that's a bit high, IMO...not sure if it's experiencing a memory leak, as it's using 4 GB while idle.

UPDATE (11/14/2025):

I decided to try to deploy a containerized Owncloud instance.  The compose YML file was a bit more beefy.  It was copied from the Owncloud documentation.  

I had to deploy this one from CLI, for now...I ran into an issue that I need to sort out - once I sort it out, I'll redeploy using Portainer.

I did run into an environment setting issue.  OWNCLOUD_TRUSTED_DOMAINS needed an IP value (IP of the server itself) - the documentation is vague on this and I found the answer from within a bug report.

I thought that a containerized Nextcloud instance was quick - this server is even quicker than a containerized Nextcloud instance.

I will have a bake-off of these two instances, but I suspect I'll be again adopting Owncloud as a docker cloud app.

UPDATE (11/17/2025):

One thing that is super weird is that Owncloud won't allow uploading of directories.  To upload a directory of MP3s, for example, I've to create a folder named, "MP3s" and then upload all the files within the MP3 directory.  WTF?!  Note that I can move folders if I use the Owncloud client software.  I'm not wanting to install the client software on every system I have.  It's like they're actively fighting to not have a directory upload feature.  With Nextcloud (and Google Drive, and OneDrive), I just have to select the folder and the whole folder is treated as an object (meaning, the the directory and it's contents will be uploaded/downloaded).  It's damned silly not to include it.  I think I ran into the same issue years ago when I used Owncloud (like 7+ years ago!).  I researched and someone said, well it works with Google...blame the browser creators (double-WTF?!)  Nah...I'm blaming Owncloud because things like that are silly and if they're doing things like this, what else are they doing within the code?  It looks like Owncloud decided for me which to use (and it's not Owncloud).  I'm glad I didn't manually install it, only to see the lack of directory uploading.  

Containers Update

I posted awhile back that I was having issues with a containerized deployment of Pihole.

I also posted not long ago that I decided to use Portainer to manage my deployment container stacks.

I thought I could fix the original Pihole container, but after seeing it die again, I immediately began work on using a different system as a host for the containers.  

I have three laptops that weren't being used.  Each was running Window desktop OS variants.  I wanted to install Linux on each.

The three candidate replacement systems were:

Dell Latitude E5530:  This system is a very old system that I bought used for $100 - 4 GB of RAM; i5-3380 CPU

Alienware 15 R2:  This system is also an older system, but not quite as old as the E5530 system mentioned above.  This was used by my daughter.  We initially thought the system was broken but I couldn't find anything wrong with it.  It ias 8 GB of RAM and uses the i5-6300 CPU.  It has a 1 TB HDD.  It also has a small (256 GB) SSD.

Alienware M17x R3:  This system is also an olser system but has the best specs of the three candidate systems:  12 GB RAM, i7-2760QM CPU; 750 GB SSD

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 onto each of the three systems, testing to determine how well that Ubuntu version would operate on those hardware platforms (while also keeping in mind that they were laptops).

I found that the Alienware M17x system was the most robust and ran Ubuntu without issues.  The other two systems run Ubuntu well enough, but I noticed they were under higher load when idle.

As the systems already had Ubuntu, it was pretty easy for me to install the prerequisite packages for Docker.  It was super easy to get my containers up and running again on the new host.

On top of that, I installed Portainer not long after getting the new host sorted.  I then had to duplicate the Pihole container from within Portainer so that Portainer would have full control over it.  Until I did that, I had limited control over Pihole using Portainer.  Note that I've already posted about Portainer.

I've been monitoring the new host and redeployed hosts.  I've noticed no issues.

I also kept the original system running (a Dell XPS 8930 with an i5-8400 CPU, 8 GB RAM, and 1 TB HDD).  A Pihole container is still running on that host and it hasn't thrown errors since I moved to a new hosting system, oddly enough.  

About the only thing that I had to enable as a requirement was for the M17x system to not sleep/hibernate when I closed the lid.  I found a way to disable hibernation on that host.

As a server, the M17x runs like a champ, especially when Linux is used.

I'd still be using that system if it weren't for the fact that it tends to eat GPUs.  It's been through two Nvidia GeForce 580M GPUs and those weren't cheap.  I think it was the 580Ms that were fragile.

In fact, all of those Dell systems responded extremely well to Linux, especially the Alienware 15 R2, as Windows was choking it...this was why my daughter stopped using it.  It was running Windows 10 when she stopped using it and while I couldn't find anything wrong with the system, when I was troubleshooting, I saw that the HDD appeared to be what was choking the system. Drive resources were constantly pegged when monitoring Task Manager.  That all stopped when I installed Ubuntu.  That's the power of Linux right there!

I'll update the blog if I see anything bad, but I've been monitoring the new host for almost 2 months and I've not seen any issues.

Which Mac Will Be My Next System?

I've always been curious about the Mac Studio and I'd initially had that on my list of must-have systems until the new Mac Mini M4s came out.

I now have tentative plans to buy the Mac Mini M4.  I want to use that system to heavy-lift creation of my videos, as well as to maybe utilize it for housing of my Docker containers.

I love my current M1 Mini but it is a base model and I'm somewhat limited in the above-mentioned use cases.  While I can crunch video footage, I usually have to kill all other resource-intensive running processes when doing that.  I've not even tried to use Docker containers on that system, since running multiple containers usually requires a somewhat robust system (plus there's some system overhead since Docker can't natively run on Mac systems).

The real difference between the Studio and Mini would be ports and connectivity to peripherals, which would be extremely beneficial.  

As well, you can better spec out a Studio, as the platform is designed to be more open-ended as it relates to performance.  UPDATE:  Nope!!  I was wrong - I can spec out more RAM and undercut the price (drastically) of a somewhat similarly spec'd Studio.

So, my dilemma is, which one would be better for me, a high spec (lots of memory) Mini or a decently spec'd Studio?

I'm Now Managing My Docker Containers Using Portainer

I sometimes end up breaking my container setups because I sometimes get confused with all the layers and config settings (and I don't even have all that many containers), so I began to investigate management alternatives.

Of course, I'm still leveraging a locally managed Linux system (Ubuntu) to run my containers.  I've not tried to install containers on Mac hosts and I'm not even going to try with Windows.  From what I understand, I've to use a VM to run Linux on a Mac host, or use Docker Desktop.  I'd rather just use native Linux since I'm a Linux power user...anything else appears to drastically add complications, plus it's kind of stupid to install Linux on a VM when I've a bunch of Linux hosts that I can immediately leverage.

I decided to try Portainer after watching some usage videos.  It was super-simple to get it running (it's containerized) and it was super easy to shut down my existing containers and run them on Portainer - I just copied each compose.yml into Portainer to set them up as containers.  While I could see the pre-Portainer container (before I'd shut them down), they were only partially manageable with Portainer.  Building them under Portainer gave me full control.

As well, I found where Portainer keeps it's underlying files so that I could leverage them (if need be).  I also keep copies of my compose.yml files (I do not use Git or GitHub for my files - yet).

I'm currently using five containers (three for Wordpress, one for Pi-hole, and one for Portainer), which allows me to use Portainer's community license setup, but I've also found that I can manage the currently running containers (all five) from Portainer, without licensing agents.

Portainer is something I'm going to be using as much as possible.  I haven't even tried the other solutions but Portainer gives me a more comprehensive method of managing my containers and I'm less confused with it than via CLI; I don't even need to experiment with the other solutions.  Yes, I can manage the containers natively, via CLI (as I was doing prior to using Portainer), but I'd rather not, especially as I run more stacks (I've recently started using Nextcloud and Owncloud containers - a bake-off).  I'm finding as I manage more containers, I sometimes get lost in the thick of them.  With Portainer, I'm less lost.

iPhone 13 PM sent to Verizon for Trade-in

Well, I've sent my 13 PM to Verizon to complete the trade-in process.  

I didn't really want to send it back, but the trade-in value ($1100) needs to go toward financing the 17 PM.  

I'm locked in now...LOL!  Seriously, though, I'm enjoying the 17 PM.

UPDATE (10/12/2025):  Verizon received my trade-in on 10/10.  They assessed it yesterday, and I  received the full proposed value of the phone, which was $1100!  For those folks who are sceptical, there it is - Verizon provided me the full trade-in value of the phone.  Keep in mind that my trade-in was relatively pristine.  It's used, yes - there was indication of normal usage across three years of ownership, such as some patina around the USB-C port.  The phone was in a silicon case during the three years of usage, but it was, considering that timeframe of usage, pretty clean.  It's all relative.  This was a great way to obtain a 1-TB iPhone, in my opinion...was the first time I've ever attempted to leap upward.  Maybe next time I'll go 2-TB.