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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

#41

Post by scott01 »

Asmod4n wrote: post #36

I wouldn't go the route and use a VPS for personal stuff, ever. Or a Cloud Provider for that matter. Find a Hoster which offers you a shell login where the Hoster manages close to all services you need, including backups, security updates and so on. That should massively simplify your setup.

Funnily you've mentioned, I explored this route and found one 'normal' web hosting that provides an SVN repo. But in my case, I need a Git hosting to collaborate with friends on private stuff (I don't like an idea of my code being fed into an LLM by GitHub) and a VPN for travels, so VPS is a requirement, unfortunately.

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

#42

Post by smackeyacky »

scott01 wrote: post #37
Multicomp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

Are you routing a traffic from a VPS to your home? I've considered a set up like this where my home PC would be permanently VPN-connected to the VPS, but I think the problem was making it secure, e.g. making a virtual network at home to separate my personal stuff to be potentially accessible from the internet.

Use Tailscale for this

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

#43

Post by Wool2662 »

I use a single old PC at home. Put debian on it, install docker and unattended upgrades. Create docker compose files for all services. Make sure to use 'latest' everywhere and run watchtower to update all images regularly. While i expose a select few services to the internet I connect to most of them via VPN. In the local network I'm using pihole for local DNS and since I use a wildcard let's encrypt certificate I have ssl for everything which makes it nice to use.

Haven't had to touch the system more than once a year or so when I got an alert that unattended upgrades couldn't install something.

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

#44

Post by scott01 »

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?

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

#45

Post by BrandoElFollito »

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 used docker compose for years and recently moved to portainer because it is easier to keep track of the docker compose files and you have a lot of things readily available

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

#46

Post by scott01 »

exe34 wrote: post #6
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…

Oh and if you don't want to go full nixos, you can just install whatever the base image for your server from the provider and run nix as a separate install for your applications.

This is quite interesting, thanks for recommendation, I'll investigate this. Are you aware of any edge cases or inconveniences of this approach I can keep in mind while experimenting?

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

#47

Post by BrandoElFollito »

Wool2662 wrote: post #43

I use a single old PC at home. Put debian on it, install docker and unattended upgrades. Create docker compose files for all services. Make sure to use 'latest' everywhere and run watchtower to update all images regularly. While i expose a select few services to the internet I connect to most of them via VPN. In the local network I'm using pihole for local DNS and since I use a wildcard let's encrypt certificate I ha…

Agreed (including the old PC).

The only thing I do not upgrade automatically is Home Assistant (major tag, the minors are). I had one failed update and it created tension say home when lights stopped to work, people stuck in fridges, aliens landing and whatnot. It fid not help I was 1500 km away.

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

#48

Post by andycowley »

40099933 wrote: post #26
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…

I've always struggled with how to get started. I get lost in picking which CNI(?) I need and how to manage stateful storage. Do you have any pointers towards how to get going?

Look up k3s and start there

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

#49

Post by aynyc »

I used to have multiple RPIs, and different physical servers (old PCs). I tried dockers and others because I though I was cool. Until I decided to just use one modern PC (actually a work computer that was off lease), and run docker for each of my server stack. I can't tell you how much easier my life has become when it comes to admin.

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

#50

Post by paweladamczuk »

kcartlidge wrote: post #38
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.

Totally. And whilst I've used most provisioning tools (quite liking packer and terraform), for my own stuff I have a file with notes and snippets. Follow that file and within less than 10 minutes I've got a working server with Postgres, Nginx, and LetsEncrypt, and it's ready for Git push-to-deploy. Simplicity is what you need, for as long as you can get away with it. Simplicity and backups.

Do you happen to keep your script public? I would enjoy taking a look at it to learn something.
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