Was hired kind of on the side by a friend to set up a Nextcloud instance on this old server. He had Windows Server on it. I did offer to install Debian instead, but he wanted to keep Windows, to which I said, fine, I know Powershell, I know how to use Windows, it's whatever.
It wasn't whatever.
Installing Docker alone was hellish. Tried to install via the command line. It didn't work, and it turns out dependencies vary, and also, when you install Docker as admin, and then try to run it as admin, it tells you that you have insufficient privileges(???) I remembered that everything in Windows is done with the GUI anyway, so did that. It didn't work. Why? Missing DLL. Where do I get that DLL? From installing Hyper-V. Why do I need Hyper-V? Who knows. But it required me to also enable the hypervisor in the BIOS. Was I actually using Hyper-V for Docker for some reason? No, of course not. But it needs that DLL. Oh, and it needs WLS. So, four long-ass restarts of the computer later, and a half-gigabyte download on a SIM's internet connection, and another half gig for WLS, and Docker is finally installed.
Installed Nextcloud, realized I forgot an environment variable, reinstalled Nextcloud. Shit just would not work. TLS authentication through Cloudflare Tunnel (cuz yeah his only choice was to use that) was failing. After finally giving up on Tunnel and deciding to show him how to get it set up back at his place without it, I learned that it was probably failing because port 443 was occupied. What was it occupied with? Why, another Nextcloud container. Yeah, while I was using the CLI to remove the containers I first had going before correcting the environment variables, the GUI that remained in the background was nevertheless starting them back up.
After all this struggle, totaling almost six hours, it turns out that the stupid SIM router he bought requires you to restart the router to apply new port forwarding settings (which it calls "Virtual Server" for some ungodly reason). And then when you restart the router, it also resets all your settings anyway. So it just doesn't work.
Oh, also, the domain name that he had was, for whatever reason, registered under Cloudflare, but not the Cloudflare account he was using. He doesn't know how that happened, but it meant his DNS were all wrong and, because Cloudflare is jank as fuck, would remain wrong. So that was a whole absolutely befuddling ordeal.
And I simply do not understand why anyone would ever use Windows Server for anything. It's just worse in every imaginable way. I've set up and taken down fully functional Nextcloud instances in under half an hour, and if it weren't for his insistence on keeping this Windows Server 2022 install for some reason, maybe this instance would actually be functioning for him now, and I wouldn't be absolutely swimming in impostor syndrome.
