First my specific questions, down below more info:
- how do you use ansible? Is there a good source for roles or playbooks to set up services? I feel like ansible is 30% more headache right now during config.
- how do you deal with motivation loss?
- how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of choices and information and disciplines (networking, storage, VMS, Linux…) that comes with selfhosting?
- how do you find the sweetspot between ease of use, ease of set up, security, redundancy? I feel like I am maybe too pranaoid to loose my data again (dropped a hard drive many years back, I lost all of my projects)
- maybe overall, how do you manage your perfectionism?
Thanks a lot! I hope you have some insights for me.
More info
Soo I have a motivational push to work on my server every few months for a few weeks or months. I always make progress and I feel like I landed on a good solution by now. Its the third time I redid my setup, everytime I got closet to what feels like the perfect setup for me.
I have a vps for headscale, a home server with proxmox for the rest.
Last push I switched from manually configuring and documenting to ansible. I like ansible, but its also a pain and not as fast to set up my server as just installing it and fiddeling around manually until it works.
My problem is: I want to do it right, so my server is robut with enough redundancy to move all my cloud stuff to it. But I am still kind of a noob and still learning and figuring things out.
My fear is, that if i don’t document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.
So ansible seems like the only valid choice here, together with proxmox to be as flexible and future proof. But I am burnt out again and lost Motivation even though I am close to my first goals and running services.
Thank you for reading :)
It sounds like you’re trying to learn but have an “all or nothing” mentality to going about it. Nothing is mastered all of a sudden and expecting mastery out the gate is a recipe for burn out. If you’re goal is absolute perfection then you’ll never even start.
Go through the online docs and training resources first to gain an understanding of how to assemble playbooks without a direct implementation target attached.
Once you have a sense of what Ansible is and what it can do for you, pick something small to do for yourself. For example, create a playbook that sets up nginx for a single purpose. When there are a 100 different ways to do something, you’ll never do it right. You’ll do it acceptably, then you’ll do it again better and then you’ll do it again more flexibly, etc. If you know or pick up Python then you’ll start being able to dive into custom modules and plugins.
A toolkit is something you build over time. You build it over time because it’s impossible to know what you’ll need before you start. If you do end up pulling together a toolkit that you think it appropriate and complete before you start working then you’ll have a mess of configurations that are not applicable and mostly inappropriate that you’ll end up debugging forever.
Start small. Start where you are.