I wanted to quickly share this moment in hopes it is a learning lesson. The moral of this is be resourceful when on your grind for knowledge.
Documentation, the paragraphs of information nobody wants to read, but inevitably have to in order to solve something. It can be painful as the person who created the software/hardware to create documentation which is harder, since you have to consider almost all scenarios for this device. When working with software, the documentation will be probably your best source of information when trying to solve something. I understand that it isn’t always the case. Such as the documentation is poorly written, not updated to latest standards or to match the software version or there may not be anything from the company/publisher. However, I believe that if there is any legitimate documentation, you should go to the resource first for help before searching elsewhere
The reason I drive this home is because recently I started tinkering with Containers. I will be coming out with another post about this for explanation but for now let’s keep the context there. I started to watch a course from Pluralsight to grab an understanding. For the most part, it was very informative and made me excited to start messing around. After watching, I decided to create a lab environment for this and then rewatch some content to follow along. That was when problems started to emerge. To simplify, i was able to configure my lab to have the Container technology, but i couldn’t make any containers. I kept getting the same error. I decided to search why. As it turns out, a few things i was missing that i didn’t expect:
- To start off, in order to make a certain image container, you would have download that from Docker Hub. Microsoft had their own repository to pull images of containers. you simply run a command on your server that included a URL to point to where the image is located. I didn’t realize that the course had different URLs
- Another to consider when creating a container host and the container images used to make the image.I have included a snippet of the Version Compatibility between Window Server Containers. I suggest you read or skim this if you plan on playing around Microsoft and Containers. The key takeaway is that the version of the container image and the server hosting the container be the same OS or compatible. Microsoft includes in the link i provided of what is/is not compatible. This was frustrating to consider because the course didn’t really mention this. I can confirm this as well because I had a container host using Windows Server 2019 and when I tried making a Windows Server 2016 container, it wasn’t compatible. For
- I will add this last because it ties another concept. The videos from Pluralsight were published in 2017. This was around the time when 2016 was out and Containers was relatively newer for Windows. Now the overall concept is still the same, but little details and such have changed enough to where my own research was necessary to get this going. This goes to show that technology advances quickly and looking at the documentation (from reliable sources) is your best bet of knowing how the latest works
With technology constantly evolving, I can see the annoyance of having to keep learning consume a lot of time. On the other hand, it is a reminder on how the world works. Things change or update, and you have to be able to keep up especially in this industry. I also felt accomplished because it forced me to troubleshoot something. It was one of those errors were it wasn’t my fault, it was just a matter of knowing how the technology currently works. I hope this was insightful and i will be posting a little intro to Containers at some point so stay tuned!