Running Pterodactyl at home made game hosting easier, but the bigger lesson was learning to separate management intent, node control, Docker execution, gameplay, storage, and recovery into distinct failure domains.
Containers gave my homelab a repeatable application model, but the useful part was the discipline around persistence, networking, updates, and recovery.
How inconsistent Docker mounts create failed imports, duplicate copies, broken hardlinks, and misleading permission errors across a media automation stack.