Quadlets are a real game changer for this type of small-to-medium scale declarative hosting. I've been pushing for them at work over ugly `docker compose in systemd units` service management and moved my home lab over to using them for everything. The latter is a similar setup to OP except with OpenSUSE MicroOS instead of Fedora CoreOS and I'm not so brave as to destroy and rebuild my VPS's whenever I make a change :) . On the other hand, MicroOS (and I'm assuming FCOS) reboots automatically to apply updates with rollback if needed so combined with podman auto-update you can basically just spin up a box, drop the files on, and let it take care of itself (at least until a container update requires manual intervention).
A few things in the article I think might help the author:
1. Podman 4 and newer (which FCOS should definitely have) uses netavark for networking. A lot of older tutorials and articles were written back when Podman used CNI for it's networking and didn't have DNS enabled unless you specifically installed it. I think the default `podman` network is still setup with DNS disabled by default. Either way, you don't have to use a pod if you don't want to anymore, you can just attach both containers to the same network and it should Just Work.
2. You can run the generator manually with "/usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/podman-system-generator --dry-run" to check Quadlet validity and output. Should be faster than daemon-reload'ing all the time or scanning the logs.
And as a bit of self-promotion: for anyone who wants to use Quadlets like this but doesn't want to rebuild their server whenever they make a change, I'm created a tool called Materia[0] that can install, remove, template, and update Quadlets and other files from a Git repository.
Do you know if it is possible to run a quadlet as an ephemeral systemd-sysuser? That would solve all my current problems.
Not sure I'm following; you want to create a an emphemeral system account and run a root-less Podman container as it? I don't think that's something supported out of the box but you may be able to jury rig something together by putting the quadlets directly in `/etc/containers/systemd/users/` instead of putting them in a home directory (since I'm assuming this is a systemd-sysuser created account and thus without a home).