My uncle has this saying. You’ll regularly find him making some contraption or fixing something or digging a hole. He’s the kind of person you expect will have his head stuck under the bonnet of a car. You know the kind of fella. If the car doesn’t start, your heating isn’t working or there’s a blague of zombies sweeping the land, he is the kind of person you want beside you because as sure as day follows night, he’s going to come up with something useful. Anyway, his saying is he’s just “Tricking around”. Well, I find myself doing a lot of that. In a very different way of course. I admire him. I would love to be able to do what he does but my tricking around is usually along the lines of something technology related. So when a friend said he was looking at UnRaid, I had absolutely nothing to do that evening so I thought I’d spin up a machine and take a look at it along with him.

UnRaid is an amazing project! It has support for software RAID, storage caching, backups and everything else you would expect from a powerful and versatile NAS operating system. But it also has a lot more. It has support for running Docker containers and a really smart bloke extended this functionality so that it can use the Docker Hub. The Docker Hub is a registry of community contributed and private docker containers. There’s thousands of them! HomeBridge, Unifi, Apache, enginX, the list goes on and on. I got UnRaid set up during that evening and the next night I got Docker containers configured for Lets encrypt, MariaDB and Next cloud. But instead of being happy with this solution, it gave me a thirst to learn more about Docker. I had of course heard of Docker before and I have used it in a very limited way. But I saw an actual use case where I had a good insentive outside of work to use it.

I gave UnRaid it’s last rights and promptly formatted the operating system disks. I then spun up a VM on my trusty Dell poweredge server and began the very interesting and very fast process of installing Docker. Of course, installing and configuring Docker can be as complex as you like but I’m a newb at this so within about an hour I had the installation running as I expected it to.

I then installed containers for Lets Encrypt, MariaDB and Nextcloud. My YML file wasn’t quite right though so I made a mess of the networking. Another few days later and I finally got time to get back to this. Armed with a little more experience and knowledge, my YML file was perfect and with just one command, it worked beautifully. I already had the port open from the outside world so LetsEncrypt gave me the certificate right away and within seconds I had Nextcloud singing and dancing on my screen. The MariaDB config had already been completed through the YML file template so I was delighted with the simplicity.

I’m not an expert. In fact I’m absolutely clueless when it comes to docker still. I’m still only learning what can be done with it. I realized for example that Cifs wasn’t installed on NextCloud. Fortunately, mounting the container was incredibly simple and in no time I had Cifs installed.

Why did I need Cifs? Simple. I love my existing NAS. It’s been running for a lot time and it has every feature it could possibly need. Here’s the thing that’s probably going to make you laugh at all of this time that I invested. My NAS has all the features of NextCloud and more. But at least now i have something that I don’t quite need but still is useful in a way and while making and breaking it over several evenings, I’ve managed to learn more about Docker. I have more to learn. I think I’m going to install the Unifi container next. I don’t want to put too much into Docker. I don’t understand it enough yet and things like the Unifi controller have been working from a Raspberry pi for years. I really don’t want to break it. That controller manages all of the wireless access points in the house so without it, I would be a little stuck.

I learn so much more with this kind of thing than I do in courses or through reading. I just need to find the motivation.