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 :)

  • Sightline@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    I mean my root filesystem is immutable, it runs completely in RAM (squashfs). After trying NixOS and seeing that article I linked about an immutable Alpine NAS I decided to try it for myself. I found it easier to just customize the Arch ISO builder and generate/update images as needed versus following the article exactly, I’m also not familiar with Alpine itself.

    Packages aren’t pinned in my Arch image and it’s not 100% deterministic, but that’s fine it’s a risk I’m willing to take. So far it’s been absolutely rock solid, lean and easy to manage.

    Also, I found NixOS annoying because:

    1. the language

    2. the config application (I forget the command) was doing god knows what behind the scenes. My needs aren’t that complicated, I’m comfortable with just manually setting things up and locking that in by generating an Arch image. It’s way easier.