Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 67 posts

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#11

Post by markhahn »

ripjaygn wrote: post #4

Maybe containerize most things since distros change a lot between releases. That way you can keep your distro on the latest version and even switch distros without too much impact.

what does "your distro" mean here? the distro in the container, or the container host, or the client host?

containers are just a packaging/isolation technique. you can keep using an obsolete stack in a container, regardless of what changes outside it. rebuilding containers from scratch is certainly not easier than rebuilding an install via ansible.

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#13

Post by lallysingh »

don-code wrote: post #9

Kubernetes. No, seriously. It's an orchestration tool that's common in the real world, and also notoriously hard to learn and "get right". Downtime due to obvious, important mistakes is common, and it leaves both engineers and lower management wondering if it was a good idea to adopt. The thing is, in your home environment, you have no (or hopefully significantly lower) uptime requirements. If you break the entire cl…

This. K8s in the small is easy to set up and a great way to abstract your setup n differences from your apps.

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#14

Post by ckwalsh »

don-code wrote: post #9

Kubernetes. No, seriously. It's an orchestration tool that's common in the real world, and also notoriously hard to learn and "get right". Downtime due to obvious, important mistakes is common, and it leaves both engineers and lower management wondering if it was a good idea to adopt. The thing is, in your home environment, you have no (or hopefully significantly lower) uptime requirements. If you break the entire cl…

+1 to this. I run Ubuntu 22.04 with microk8s. Keep all my yaml files in a local git repo, figured out how to hook up my NAS to provide storage via nfs.

It's definitely gone down a few times, but I've learned a TON tinkering with it. super easy to spin up a new hobby project, a nice web UI for seeing what the heck is going on.

I've completely borked it a couple times and survived one micro pc migration. Can't recommend it more

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#15

Post by mynegation »

Docker-compose and be done with it. Kubernetes and NixOS are great and more powerful than docker compose, but the learning curve is longer. Feel free to graduate to k8s or NixOS, once you are up and running with compose. Docker compose has the most tutorials, YouTube videos, the widest support among projects you want to self host, and many more people who can readily advise you on troubleshooting. Check out r/selfhosted to get a feeling.

You can use portainer if you need a GUI but command line is not that complicated if you are comfortable with CLIs.

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#16

Post by anon291 »

talldayo wrote: post #2

I was going to suggest NixOS. It's a bit of a climb to learn it, but having a modular setup that works with all my devices is absolutely a killer-app. My desktop, laptop, VPS and Raspberry Pi all share the same terminal configuration from the same Git repo. Waxing poetic about NixOS on HN is a horse well-beaten. Just try it, if you've got an extra machine laying around and a few hours to spare. I think it's a great h…

I will echo you. I use nix and kubernetes and have achieved great success. I have my configuration as nixos modules. Making a host a kubernetes controller is just a false -> true flip.

All my images are built and stored and served via tftp and a remote nix store for the servers to boot. Very easy to build the system and then do atomic upgrades. Best part is ... Rollbacks if the config is bad are easy and fool proof.

I would never use mutable distributions in production. Too scary.

My nix boxes need very little minding.

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#17

Post by hwbunny »

cd /

dpkg --get-selections >>installed_packages

git init

git add installed_packages /etc /home/*/.* /root /whateverneeded

git commit -m "system init"

on a new system just copy over the .git folder

install packages from installed_packages, then git checkout

reboot

that's all :D

or there is chef, puppet

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#18

Post by Multicomp »

uniqueuid wrote: post #8

Opinionated take: "a couple of home servers" are probably the wrong solution to your problem. Almost everything you do as a private person works better, faster, more reliably, and with much less time investment if you use a single machine for it.

Yeah I use ansible (in pull mode) for my home automation for just such a purpose. I have the router open up port 443 to my one box, then have haproxy read the header for the incoming traffic and route it to the backend on the box whether a docker container or a local service. Foundry VTT, jellyfin, etc.

All from Ansible, all to a private github that I just SSH into the machine long enough to run ansible pull.

That way, when I run into errors, it's just rinse and repeat to iterate my ansible playbook code until it is perfectly fit for this exact situation. Is my code maintainable and enterprisey like my work ansible? NOPE. But it's okay, it's my private code that nobody but me uses. I even do direct commits on master because I can, it's my tiny naughty guilty pleasure.

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#19

Post by semi-extrinsic »

uniqueuid wrote: post #8

Opinionated take: "a couple of home servers" are probably the wrong solution to your problem. Almost everything you do as a private person works better, faster, more reliably, and with much less time investment if you use a single machine for it.

This.

Also, why run different OSes on your machines? And why the need to reinstall stuff?

I just run Arch on everything, and I haven't had to reinstall a machine in many years.

Re: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

#20

Post by Semaphor »

adaszko wrote: post #12

Check out Proxmox + https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ + lxc container snapshots on the NAS and set up Proxmox backup server on the Pi. I find such a setup to be "all benefit, no giving up anything", contrary to NixOS.

Yeah, I love that stack. I then rsync those backups to backblaze. No issues, single machine, no fucking around with stuff like kubernetes (and I also got rid of docker, so that annoyance is also gone)
Post reply on HN