Selfhosted

39206 readers

436 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How to avoid "things going wrong"? (Immutable distros?) (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm working on starting up my first home server which I'm trying to make relatively foolproof and easily recoverable. What is some common maintenance people do to avoid dire problems, including those that accumulate over time, and what are ways to recover a server when issues pop up?

At first, I figured I'd just use debian with some kind of snapshot system and monitor changelogs to update manually when needed, but then I started hearing that immutable distros like microOS and coreOS have some benefits in terms of long term "os drift", security, and recovering from botched updates or conflicts? I don't even know if I'm going to install any native packages, I'm pretty certain every service I want to run has a docker image already, so does it matter? I should also mention, I'm going to use this as a file server with snapraid, so I'm trying to figure out if there will be conflicts to look out for there or with hardware acceleration for video transcoding.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I see a lot of posts like this and it's always people overthinking something they haven't tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you've actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you're just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you've not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This! And, baby-steps: don't go about installing every app you see. Try backup strategies, put them to test (bring service down and up again with data from backup). Play, have fun.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it's a good idea to have a list of the services you'd like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker