6posts
Beszel and Dockhand keep showing up in the same conversation about lightweight self-hosted tools, so people assume they compete. They do not: Beszel is a monitoring hub with historical data and alerts, Dockhand is a Docker management UI. A sysadmin comparison of the two, the measured footprint of each, and how both stack up against the common alternatives: Netdata, Grafana plus Prometheus, Glances, Uptime Kuma, and Dozzle.
A sysadmin guide to running OpenTelemetry traces on a small stack: one Collector, OTLP from your applications, sampling that keeps errors and drops the boring traffic, Tempo or Jaeger v2 as the backend, and the limits that bite when the whole pipeline runs on one box.
Docker and Incus both run containers on the same Linux primitives, but they wrap the kernel mechanism in different abstractions: Docker packages an application, Incus launches a whole operating system. A theoretical comparison of application containers and system containers, the lifecycles each one assumes, and when each unit of management is the right one, with links to our Proxmox vs IncusOS coverage.
A sysadmin's hands-on walkthrough of a scratch-based, rootless Docker image for the SimpleX Chat CLI. Since the chat server binds 127.0.0.1 only (issue #6449 is still open), a small socat bridge exposes it on 0.0.0.0. Full multi-stage Dockerfile, build and run commands, and the honest trade-offs.
A sysadmin-grade comparison of Docker Compose and Kubernetes for running many self-hosted apps: where Compose starts to hurt, how k3s changes the calculus, and how rootful Kubernetes is actually secured with RBAC, admission control, securityContext, seccomp, and network policies, and how that differs from rootful Docker.
A practical, sysadmin-grade comparison of Docker and Podman for running many self-hosted apps: Compose vs Quadlet, rootful vs rootless security and host-tool debugging, Watchtower vs podman auto-update, Docker API compatibility, and when Kubernetes is the real answer.