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I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

cleberg.net

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Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#61

Post by CamperBob2 »

l72 wrote: post #52

This is surprising to me and the exact opposite of what I want for a few reasons: 1. I don't like surprise breakages. I am not prepared to fix a service my family uses midday on a Tuesday when I am working since it auto updated. I'd like to specifically make sure I have dedicated time and plan if something is going to go wrong. 2. My family HATES when things change. I try to run LTS versions of things, but annoyingly…

By "maintaining itself" I'm sure the OP means it maintains itself in response to their commands. So nothing changes unexpectedly, or against the user's will. Any changes that prove inconvenient or problematic are fixable.

I should probably RTFA before assuming that, but that's the way my Linux box works. When something breaks or needs upgrading, I just tell the agent to deal with it. Normally that's Claude Code, but the role will be assumed by a local model soon enough.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#62

Post by doubled112 »

esperent wrote: post #59
teekert wrote: post #33

I thought this was going towards the "I have an agent do it". glad it didn't :) What this skips though is the complexity of services like NextCloud (stuck in maintenance mode again?), Immich (needs a compose file edit?), MineCraft worlds (Dad! my client is on another version again!), (dmn) AlbyHub (needs re-login and closed its channel). But to be fair this is really getting quite minimal these days indeed. I didn't…

> NextCloud (stuck in maintenance mode again?) The frustrating thing is that basically everyone who self hosts Nextcloud will know exactly what you're talking about, and the solution is generally quite simple, and yet the docs for this problem are terrible , scattered, out of date, and mostly just link to old GitHub issues that don't directly address the problem until you get to some comment half way down. It's a ter…

As a counterpoint, I’m not sure what everybody is doing to their Nextcloud installs. Many people have problems so I believe they are real, but I’m not sure where I’ve gone so right.

Right now I use Docker compose, with the major version pinned so it doesn’t surprise me. I verify app compatibility before changing that major version.

I use PostgreSQL as the DB.

I've never had real problems with it, and it wasn't for lack of trying.

I've been using Nextcloud since it forked from OwnCloud, and I was running OwnCloud before that. It was on a NAS with 64MB RAM and a 500MHz CPU at one point.

I've run it bare metal, with different Linux distros, on FreeBSD, in VMs, in LXC containers, in Docker containers, with different PHP versions, with different web servers, with different DBs, on terrible hardware, on powerful hardware, more. So many combinations.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#63

Post by zerolabs »

exiguus wrote: post #51

This is a fantastic article! I completely agree with the author's philosophy. Simple automation can reduce maintenance to nearly zero, and it's incredible how much can be achieved with just a few well-crafted scripts. I use a nearly identical alias for docker pull to keep my containers updated. To ensure everything stays running smoothly, I've built a lightweight watchdog (a mix of bash scripting and Uptime Kuma/Besz…

[dead]

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#64

Post by itomato »

botfriendsarent wrote: post #22
itomato wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did. We just didn’t classify it with a hashtag. Frankenstein couldn’t build a monster without influence. Same thing here. “CCNA? I’ll show you CCNA…”

I had a friend back in the 90s who referred to his desktop computer as "his mainframe" lol

My friends made similar jokes about my setup. Called it 'Euclid'.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#65

Post by zerolabs »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #61
l72 wrote: post #52

This is surprising to me and the exact opposite of what I want for a few reasons: 1. I don't like surprise breakages. I am not prepared to fix a service my family uses midday on a Tuesday when I am working since it auto updated. I'd like to specifically make sure I have dedicated time and plan if something is going to go wrong. 2. My family HATES when things change. I try to run LTS versions of things, but annoyingly…

By "maintaining itself" I'm sure the OP means it maintains itself in response to their commands. So nothing changes unexpectedly, or against the user's will. Any changes that prove inconvenient or problematic are fixable. I should probably RTFA before assuming that, but that's the way my Linux box works. When something breaks or needs upgrading, I just tell the agent to deal with it. Normally that's Claude Code, but…

[dead]

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#66

Post by zerolabs »

teekert wrote: post #33

I thought this was going towards the "I have an agent do it". glad it didn't :) What this skips though is the complexity of services like NextCloud (stuck in maintenance mode again?), Immich (needs a compose file edit?), MineCraft worlds (Dad! my client is on another version again!), (dmn) AlbyHub (needs re-login and closed its channel). But to be fair this is really getting quite minimal these days indeed. I didn't…

OP here - I can touch on that. Didn't really expect anyone to read this post, so it was rather brief and just focused on how I've automated out the tedious parts of maintaining my server.

However, I still build new things, launch new services, etc. I personally don't categorize that as maintenance.

In regards to your complexity comment - I have slowly built up experience over the years and now launch services where I very rarely have to edit compose files or such. However, it does happen and I would lump it into that "~15 minutes per month" bucket. I primarily use Nginx + Docker for any service I launch and can quickly diagnose issues and resolve them.

Perhaps another piece I could've mentioned is sticking to a core set of tools like this, which allow me not only to automate the basics, but also to have become adept at fixing things manually if they break.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#68

Post by rpdillon »

silversmith wrote: post #27

I also have a "homelab" with minimal maintenance requirements. I'd wager it works out to much less than 15 minutes a month over a year. The strategy is as follows: pin all services to known good versions, deny access from outside LAN, and don't touch it unless there's a new service release with new features I want. Not something I would do at work, but perfectly fine for home setting.

Same. Been using this approach since 2012 and it works very well. I do have TailScale to make access a bit easier, and my AI box has proven to be a bit touchy as I do OS/kernel upgrade that match my ROCm drivers. This got a little bit easier with the 7.x kernels, but even that transition hasn't been super smooth. Will probably spend a feelw hours tonight getting it back in shape, but all my other machines are as you describe: almost fire-and-forget!

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#69

Post by al_borland »

l72 wrote: post #52

This is surprising to me and the exact opposite of what I want for a few reasons: 1. I don't like surprise breakages. I am not prepared to fix a service my family uses midday on a Tuesday when I am working since it auto updated. I'd like to specifically make sure I have dedicated time and plan if something is going to go wrong. 2. My family HATES when things change. I try to run LTS versions of things, but annoyingly…

I’m the same way. Mine needs minimal maintenance, because I don’t do much do it. I update my container when I’m bored or something breaks because an auto-updated client is no longer compatible with the server version I’m running (which has happened one time). If there is a critical vulnerability, I’ll usually get an email about it, which has also only happened one time, and I did an update.

Plex is the main app I run that gets used day to day, and they haven’t pushed a meaningful update in years. It’s always some nonsense to try and be a streaming service or social network, which I don’t want.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#70

Post by al_borland »

teekert wrote: post #33

I thought this was going towards the "I have an agent do it". glad it didn't :) What this skips though is the complexity of services like NextCloud (stuck in maintenance mode again?), Immich (needs a compose file edit?), MineCraft worlds (Dad! my client is on another version again!), (dmn) AlbyHub (needs re-login and closed its channel). But to be fair this is really getting quite minimal these days indeed. I didn't…

> Dad! my client is on another version again!

I ended up moving everyone to Lunar Client, mostly because the Minecraft Launcher from Microsoft still requires Rosetta, and sometimes would just break for unrelated reasons. As a side effect, you can pick the version that launches, upgrade when you want, run old versions as needed. So the server upgrades can be planned instead of an emergency.

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