Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
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Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#2Yes, there's really something about old school system administration.
I do really appreciate how Fedora and Debian SA team does it, you can see here:
- https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/
- https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/
- https://dsa.debian.org/
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#3Sounds like the author realized they have a pet that they've been trying to treat like some weird franken-cattle for some time.
The note about dns is fairly orthogonal to this though. Sensible naming should be the default regardless of the physical setup. My photos are at photos.home.mydomain.com, my nas is nas.home.mydomain.com. They're the same hardware - perhaps different containers.
There are a million ways to make your life harder in this world, and a bunch of ways to make it easier. I'd put docker in the simplify category, and a bunch of the other tooling the author mentions in the complexify side. YMMV.
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#4My home lab sounds pretty similar to the author's - three compute nodes running Debian, and a single storage node (single point of failure, yes!) running TrueNAS Core.
I was initially pretty apprehensive about running Kubernetes on the compute nodes, my workloads all being special snowflakes and all. I looked at off-the-shelf apps like mailu for hosting my mail system, for instance, but I have some really bizarre postfix rules that it wouldn't support. So I was worried that I'd have to maintain Dockerfiles, and a registry, and lots of config files in Git, and all that.
And guess what? I do maintain Dockerfiles, and a registry, and lots of config files in Git, but the world didn't end. Once I got over the "this is different" hump, I actually found that the ability to pull an entire node out of service (or have fan failures do it for me), more than makes up for the difference. I no longer have awkward downtime when I need to reboot (or have to worry that the machines will reboot), or little bits of storage spread across lots of machines.
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#5He should make 1 big VM and make snapshots before trying new experiments.
That's how I'll go about the next server I rent. And that's how I did with my main project.
You can have nested VMs if you need them.
But do whatever you want ofc.
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#6Automation is useful, even in homelab environments, since manual configuration introduces human errors, and automation can speed up recovery from disasters.
This article is just for the sake of it. The author calls it old administration, but he better call it outdated and inefficient Linux administration.
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#7Once you work in enterprise IDC, setting up home labs is nothing but a liability. Unwanted stuff like UPS, cooling and more bills. I have one Intel NUC running FreeBSD 13 (dual SSD with 32 GB ram and Intel i7 CPU 8th GEN) with one jail and VM. It acts as a backup server for my Ubuntu laptop and MacBook pro. Nightly I dump data to cloud providers for offsite reasons. Finally, I set LXD, Docker and KVM on my Ubuntu dev laptop for testing. That is all. No more FreeNAS or 3 more servers including 2 RPis. I made this change during the first lockdown. They (I mean fun and excitements) went away once I handled all those expensive IT equipment/servers/firewalls/routers/WAFs funded employer ;)
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#8Honestly, it sounds more as if author is just not experienced enough to reap the rewards of containers/IaaC.
Having some servers as pets is fine for time being, but after being used to the cattle little pesky issues & upkeep starts to annoy more and more and you either give up on it and leave neglected or slowly build up most of the infra you ran away from in the first place.
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#9I've done that in the past. It was fun and nostalgic. Then I had to upgrade the OS to a newer version and things were not fun anymore. At all. And I remembered why VMs and containers are so extremely useful.
Re: Old school Linux administration – my next homelab generation
#10Once you work in enterprise IDC, setting up home labs is nothing but a liability. Unwanted stuff like UPS, cooling and more bills. I have one Intel NUC running FreeBSD 13 (dual SSD with 32 GB ram and Intel i7 CPU 8th GEN) with one jail and VM. It acts as a backup server for my Ubuntu laptop and MacBook pro. Nightly I dump data to cloud providers for offsite reasons. Finally, I set LXD, Docker and KVM on my Ubuntu dev…
Agreed, I used to run enterprise hardware at home, and it was certainly fun to tinker with (Not to mention all of the blinking lights!).
Last year I ran some numbers and realized that it just wasn't worth it, as electricity costs alone make it fairly close to what Hetzner/OVH would charge for similar hardware. I also had power go down in my area, for probably first time in 5 years or so that I lived there, which I took as a sign to just migrate away.
I peer it into my internal network using WireGuard, so I barely notice a difference in my use and now that electricity costs are skyrocketing in Europe I'm certainly very happy I went this route.