The Lounge VS Portainer

IRC as a protocol is indeed incredibly simple and easy to get started with. Years ago did discover this when I was able to make [this atrocity](https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd) bridging IRC and discord where for IRC I effectively did a simple server implementation.

There is a caveat, though. Like many older protocols (ftp) there is a lot that was not initially written down or left up to clients and server implementations. This, does lead to a lot of edge cases you need to be aware of once you want to actually support a wider user group.

Also, as this is apparently is still a discussion. IRC is not simple from a modern user UX perception. Registration can be complex and confusing, though hidden a bit through clients. Managing channels with various flags is a whole other thing. Then there is also the fact that these days people are no longer used to the fact that they can't see messages from periods where they were not connected. Of course, the latter can be easily handled by a BNC or fancy clients like https://thelounge.chat . But, that is only easy for technically inclined folks.

> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose).

For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine.

Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on ones home router. I use it on Alpine Linux, works great. It's not a shiny and attention grabbing as Discord but probably fine for everyone else. For people to create their own voice channels would require the full-blown Murmur server.

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

[4] - https://convos.chat/

[5] - https://www.mumble.info/

[6] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

As another self-hosted solution, I quite like TheLounge (https://thelounge.chat)

TheLounge (https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge) - web IRC client that I set to listen on my vpn/mesh. Works great on desktop and mobile, and supports push notifications.

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).