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 :)
Don’t use Ansible and use Nix instead.
Seriously though give yourself time and a solid goals you want to achieve, it’ll take time and it’ll be worth it as
Is this what normies feel like when Linux users tell them to just use Linux? I have some apologies to make.
Can you manage a Debian server with nix?
Nix has issues, personally I’m using an immutable distro. Right now I can go upstairs and yank the power and it’ll boot right back up like nothing ever happened.
I want something rock solid, and neither Ansible or NixOS provide that. Here’s the article that I took inspiration from: https://words.filippo.io/frood/
An immutable distro… like NixOS? Or do you mean your root filesystem is immutable? NixOS can do that too. You could normally mount your nix store as readonly and remount rw during updates if you really care about filesystem immutability, or use some snapshot system if you’re paranoid about adding new files to the store corrupting other files already in the store during an update.
The nixpkgs VM creation module, which I’ve never seen documentation for, has a mode where it generates a kernel, initrd, kernel command line, and erofs image containing a prepopulated /nix directory and that’s enough to boot the VM.
Ansible is disappointing as an IAC tool. It’s good for doing things, but it’s not good for converging systems to a desired state. Too often you end up with playbooks that are not idempotent or rely on something that was done during a previous execution of the playbook or just don’t do something that was done by a previous version, and then unless you are constantly recreating your systems you won’t notice until it’s a problem and you can’t get your system back.