I recognize this will vary depending on how much you self-host, so I’m curious about the range of experiences from the few self-hosted things to the many self-hosted things.
Also how might you compare it to other maintenance of your other online systems (e.g. personal computer/phone/etc.)?
Huge amounts of daily maintenance because I lack self control and keep changing things that were previously working.
highly recommend doing infrastructure-as-code, it makes it really easy to git commit and save a previously working state, so you can backtrack when something goes wrong
Ansible is great for this!
Got any decent guides on how to do it? I guess a docker compose file can do most of the work there, not sure about volume backups and other dependencies in the OS.
Sorry I replied to the parent comment, but check out Ansible
Oh I think i tried at one point and when the guide started talking about inventory, playbooks and hosts in the first step it broke me a little xd
I get it, the inventory is just a list of all servers and PC you are trying to manage and the playbooks contain every step you would take if you would configure everything manually.
I’ll be honest when you first set it up it’s daunting but that’s the thing! You only need to do it once, then you can deploy and redeploy anything you have in minutes.
I have weekly backups of my VMs in Proxmox. Fuck it lol.
sometimes I remember I’m self hosting things
As long as you remember before you turn off the computer!
I don’t understand. “Turn… off?”
neofetch proudly displaying 5 months of uptime
my main PC hosts nothing, everything else is always on
+1 automate your backup rolling, setup your monitoring and alerting and then ignore everything until something actually goes wrong. I touch my lab a handful of times a year when it’s time for major updates, otherwise it basically runs itself.
Typically, very little. I have ~40 containers in my Docker stack and by in large it just works. I upgrade stuff here and there as needed. I am getting ready to do a hardware refresh but again with Docker that’s pretty painless.
Most of the time spent in my lab is trying out new things. I’ll find a new something that looks cool and go down the rabbit hole with it for a while. Then back to the status quo.
It’s bursty; I tend to do a lot of work on stuff when I do a hardware upgrade, but otherwise it’s set it and forget it for the most part. The only servers I pay any significant attention to in terms of frequent maintenance and security checks are the MTAs in the DMZ for my email. Nothing else is exposed to the internet for inbound traffic except a game server VM that’s segregated (credential-wise and network-wise) from everything else, so if it does get compromised it would be a very minimal danger to the rest of my network. Everything either has automated updates, or for servers I want more control over I manually update them when the mood strikes me or a big vulnerability that affects my software hits the news.
TL;DR If you averaged it over a year, I maybe spend 30-60 minutes a week on self hosting maintenance tasks for 4 physical servers and about 20 VM’s.
Once setup correctly, almost none.
I could spend a lifetime setting up my self hosted stuff correctly.
True, didn’t say that it didn’t take me an eternity to set it up
A lot less since I started using docker instead of running separate vms for everything. Less systems to update is bliss.
For some reason my DNS tends to break the most. I have to reinstall my Pi-hole semi-regularly.
NixOS plus Docker is my preferred setup for hosting applications. Sometime it is a pain to get running but once it does it tends to run. If a container doesn’t work, restart it. If the OS doesn’t work, roll it back.
As others said, the initial setup may consume some time, but once it’s running, it just works. I dockerize almost everything and have automatic backups set up.
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Mostly nothing, except for Home Assistant, which seems to shit the bed every few months. My other services are Docker containers or Proxmox LXCs that just work.
It’s as much or as little as you want to. If you don’t want to change anything, you can use something like debian and only maintain once every 5 years (and you could even skip that).
I personally spend a little more, by choice, because I use gentoo. But if I’m busy, I can avoid maintenance by only running routine updates every couple of weeks or so.
As a complete noob trying to make A TrueNAS server, none and then suddenly lots when idk how to fix something that broke
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If you set it up really well, you’ll probably only need to invest maybe an hour or so every week or two. But it also depends on what kind of maintenance you mean. I spend a lot of time downloading things and putting them in the right place so that my TV is properly entertaining. Is that maintenance? As for updating things, I’ve set up most of that to be automatic. The stuff that’s not automatic, like pulling new docker images, I do every couple weeks. Sometimes that involves running update scripts or changing configs. Usually it’s just a couple commands.
Yeah, to clarify I don’t mean organizing/arranging files as a part of maintenance, moreso handling different installs/configs/updating. Sometimes since more folks come around to ask for help it can appear as if it’s all much more involved to maintain than it may otherwise be (with a mix of the right setups and knowledge to deal with any hiccups).
If you’re not publicly exposing things? I can go months without touching it. Then go through and update everything in an hour or so on the weekend.
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Generally, no. Most of the time the updates work without a hitch. The the exception of Nextcloud, which will always break during an upgrade.
