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 :)
You’re doing fine.
After seeing someone at work burnout, I’ll offer this advice:
Find what you enjoy doing and do nothing more (today). Itch only 1 scratch at a time.
As an analogy - consider you’ve moved into a newly built house and have an empty garden. No-one would expect you to create that perfectly first time around. Esp. in 1 weekend. It needs time to grow. Some things will need cutting down, some things will need moving. Animals will crap on it.
I think you’re trying to make it perfect, first time around. Perhaps as a fear of doing it “wrong”.
There is no wrong, it’s all a learning experience, doing things good enough for now and improving / breaking things later.
Ensure you know how to backup your files (3-2-1 rule) and the rest doesn’t matter.
I’ve re-written my ansible scripts a few times, but over months and years as I’ve learned what works best for my system.
For example, I had 1 complete script for each device. I can wipe the device (get it back on the network) and rebuild with no effort…
… then I realised that most of the scripts had very similar parts to tweak SSH and other settings, so then I learned how to call scripts from within scripts, which also meant using variables (facts) to work out if this is a 32b or 64b RasPi (for example)
That probably took 3 months
But I enjoy sitting in my garden and looking at it…
I would echo that, I’ve been a generalist computer whatnot for over 10 years. I have had to learn to network, virtual network with VMware. Manage Linux servers, then virtual servers. Switch from VMware to aws and understand basic terraform, with ansible learning as well.
Where I work we are on ansible repo 3 I think, as we have matured in how we use it and what works and what doesn’t.
When homelabing, you get to be all the things a big company would have job roles for.