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’s great to give your brain daily workouts on the ins and outs of systems, but if you’re feeling burnt out, you’re doing that too much, probably, and my guess is, it’s coming in at moments when you were trying to solve some other, more interesting/relevant problem.
It comes down to whether you’re trying to self-host, or trying to learn Linux at a level where you could get a job doing it. Often it’s a bit of both, so don’t feel like you need to make that decision right now.
But my advice: whatever you’re hosting, use their recommended easy way to host it. In most cases, this means running a container. In most cases, Docker. If you can wrap your head around using docker compose files, your practical problems are reduced by an insane amount, and idiocy at the developer level becomes your only concern. For instance, I used to run Tandoor, but the dev pushed changes into their “stable” docker container that failed to properly migrate my data, and the whole thing cacked. But that wasn’t a system problem on my end, it was a case of a dev who was more interested in playing around with data than with providing a stable app.
So, if you take this approach, which I absolutely do recommend, the one thing you need to be sure of is that you have a good backup strategy, and that you backup before you do any pulls of new images. Docker allows you to select old versions so if you don’t like changes that get pushed on something, likely you can just rebuild the old version, but the changes might mess with your database migrations, so you need those backups. Other than that, you cannot go wrong with Docker, if you just want the damn thing to work, rather than get daily aggravating lessons in esoteric systems problems which are above your paygrade.