Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

Trying to replicate "the cloud" at home is a nice way to tie their own genitals, hang some loads than start jumping.

Said that: do not use Raspi or NAS, assemble a small desktop, it can be a NAS, a router, a server for any kind of service and it's just common commodity hw, the best supported in the FLOSS world, the quickest to be replaced/the cheap for spare parts. Desktop iron today does not eat that much electricity and have enough for most common needs. And using NixOS or Guix System you do not need to run a gazillion of stuff just to show a damn hello world, so you can milk you hw as needed.

The hard part about NixOS is when you need to package something yourself. That can have a bit of a learning curve but since nixpkgs is the largest package repository you rarely need to do it.

If you are running custom stuff you can always start by just using NixOS to run a Docker container. At least that will be a reproducable OS and if you pin a specific image it will be fully reproducible. Then when you want to you can dip your toes into native Nix packages. (It really isn't that bad, just an extra thing to learn that you can defer to start)

When you create backups of the state of the machine (even if the backups are just tarballs sent over ssh to the other machines), include a copy of that file.

Learning another DSL or desired state config system is going to be a pain because they lack a lot of things programmers like, like breakpoints, good LSPs and crucially: reproducible environments.

Worse still, the DSLs shift around. I know cfengine, puppet, chef, salt and ansible. Because they keep getting replaced with cleaner abstractions over time or have a kinder eye on them from the community.

Do the simple thing, document what you do to your machines. Its not sexy but you dont have to unlearn patterns or spend time trying to fix your environment just to make your docs (which now are code) work automatically.