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Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

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

#61

Post by theshrike79 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #45
mynegation wrote: post #15

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/selfhos…

I completely agree. I did a disaster recovery test of my services (all on docker) from scratch and without documentation. I started by downloading the Debian ISO and went from there. It took me about 60 minutes to be up and running, this includes DHCP from pihole and getting everything from borg backups. I took notes to be faster/better next time but I lost them somehow :-| Docker everything and you will be fine. I u…

I have “runbooks” for all my servers and software in Obsidian.

Every time I bootstrap it, I go through the instructions I wrote and improve/update if necessary.

Much simpler than Ansible

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

#62

Post by hbogert »

ratg13 wrote: post #7

I'd recommend just using cloud-init. If you're running a server in the cloud it's already available. It takes no effort to set up yourself .. and it's just a basic script that is run that sets up a server exactly how you want it.

cloud-init is nice if your VM is throwaway. Is that feasible in a home-setting?

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

#63

Post by theshrike79 »

My home NAS/server just runs Unraid. It’s drop dead simple and works.

For cloud/vps stuff I use a bunch of docker-compose files + configs that do pretty much everything. The underlying os is usually Debian because it’s what I’m used to and it doesn’t break stuff by going too fast.

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

#64

Post by BrandoElFollito »

theshrike79 wrote: post #61
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I did a disaster recovery test of my services (all on docker) from scratch and without documentation. I started by downloading the Debian ISO and went from there. It took me about 60 minutes to be up and running, this includes DHCP from pihole and getting everything from borg backups. I took notes to be faster/better next time but I lost them somehow :-| Docker everything and you will be fine. I u…

I have “runbooks” for all my servers and software in Obsidian. Every time I bootstrap it, I go through the instructions I wrote and improve/update if necessary. Much simpler than Ansible

My last test was pre-Obsidian time (now I put everything in there). I will have to run one more time and, this time, make sure the steps are saved somewhere.

Since I basically install the OS, configure networking, install docker, install borg, recover from backup, start portainer, start the stacks - it would be overkill to use Ansible for that (not to mention hat I am not a big fan of Ansible after having tried for a year to make it reliably work on lossy/unstable networks -- IMHO salt is much better)

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

#65

Post by kkfx »

scott01 wrote: post #44
kkfx wrote: post #21

NixOS or Guix Systems are the less archaic way, civilized people (Lisp vignette here) have in 2024 to manage digital life. Learning Nix is a pain but learning enough to been able to run a PERSONAL infra it's not so challenging. 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 N…

Yeah, my 'NAS' is going to be a small N100 or 5700U PC, or something along these lines. Have you had any luck running NixOS or Guix on a VPS?

Never tried, I have static IPv4 and v6 so I feel no need for a VPS, but various guides exists for OVH and Hetzner, so I imaging it's not that hard, at least for NixOS.

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

#66

Post by eh8 »

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…

Late to the party but this is my configuration that I use for my home servers:

https://github.com/eh8/chenglab

I was a complete Nix beginner three months ago and thought Nix was terribly complicated and unnecessary. Glad to say I was wholly wrong and the transition was not that bad.

NixOS me provision my servers from scratch to functional file/media/home automation server in about 15 minutes using an entirely automated Nix installation process. It’s a beautiful OS for servers

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

#67

Post by pxc »

talldayo wrote: post #57
scott01 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cloud providers don't provide NixOS, e.g. I use OVH Cloud. IIUC, there is a way to run a script that will delete my OS and install Nix, but I think there might be side effects like cloud-specific network setup which will probably be too much for me :) Edit: But NixOS looks really good, I have to agree. I guess 'immutability' will let me just install and forget about it.

> IIUC, there is a way to run a script that will delete my OS and install Nix There is! It's a fucking nightmare: https://xiaoyehua.dev/posts/nixos-on-oracle-arm-machine It works though, and thanks to the genius that wrote this script I've got a 4 core 24gb Oracle Always Free instance loaded up with NixOS at all hours of the day. I feel spoiled.

I think they're referring to this implementation: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere

but cleverca22's work is solid as well

there's also the earlier https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

and the built-in NIXOS_LUSTRATE: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-installing-from-o...

I'd go with nixos-anywhere, personally

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