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.)?
Too much, just, too much
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.
And that update destroys everything
Generally, no. Most of the time the updates work without a hitch. The the exception of Nextcloud, which will always break during an upgrade.
And why I no longer run NC. Every time it would fuck itself to death and I’d have to start from scratch again.
I have just been round my small setup and run an OS update, took about an hour. That includes a reboot of a dedicated server with OVH.
a pi and mini PC at home, a dedi at OVH running 2 LXC and 5 qemu vms. All deb a mix of 11 and 12.
I spend Wednesday evenings checking what updates need installing, I get an email every week from newreleases.io with software updates and run Semaphore to check on OS updates.
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.
Very minimal. Mostly just run updates every now and then and fix what breaks which is relatively rare. The Docker stacks in particular are quite painless.
Couple websites, Lemmy, Matrix, a whole email stack, DNS, IRC bouncer, NextCloud, WireGuard, Jitsi, a Minecraft server and I believe that’s about it?
I’m a DevOps engineer at work, managing 2k+ VMs that I can more than keep up with. I’d say it varies more with experience and how it’s set up than how much you manage. When you use Ansible and Terraform and Kubernetes, the count of servers and services isn’t really important. One, five, ten, a thousand servers, it matters very little since you just run Ansible on them and 5 minutes later it’s all up and running. I don’t use that for my own servers out of laziness but still, I set most of that stuff 10 years ago and it’s still happily humming along just fine.
+1 for docker and minimal maintenance. Only updates or new containers might break stuff. If you don’t touch it, it will be fine. Of course there might be some container specific problems. Depends what you want to run. And I’m not a devops engineer like Max 😅
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.
Nightly backups to a repurposed qnap running pbs. I’m fully aware it’s overkill but it gives me some peace of mind.
I opted weekly so I could store longer time periods. If I want to go a month back I just need 4 instead of 30. At least that was the main Idea. I’ve definitely realized I fucked something up weeks ago without noticing before lol.
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I run everything in containers that rebuild every time / auto update but I do so because I have everything backed up and I can easily roll back if something doesn’t work. I mount storage separately so I can simply remount an older backup to the same place in the file system.
Took a good day to set it all up but now I can add anything else I need with a simple compose script. The main host is also built from an image that auto updates every night.
So basically I spend zero time anymore bar when XZ happened since I use a rolling release (yes, I’m a mad man but I enjoy the odd breakage to see what’s going on in the Linux world).
The real trick is partitioning the OS up so that boot image and system are on an SSD and everything else on a massive RAID array with snapshots written to the array and all scripts/configs in git. It means I can rebuild the entire setup in a matter of minutes.
Very little. Thanks to Docker + Watchtower I don’t even have to check for updates to software. Everything is automatic.
Synology user running some docker contains.
Very, very little maintenance. If there’s an update for something on docker, a simple click in the container manager, and it’s done. Yes, I can automate, but prefer to manually do these as many of the docker apps I use are in high development and I like to know what’s changing with each version.
Synology packages update easily, and the system updates happen only once in a while. A click and reboot.
I’ve tried to minimize things as much as possible, and to make things easier for me. One day, someone in my family will need to take over, and I don’t want to over-complicate things for them, lest they lose all our family photos, documents, etc.
I probably spend more time keeping the fans on my actual NAS clean of dust, than I do maintaining the software end of things. LOL
Once setup correctly, almost none.
I could spend a lifetime setting up my self hosted stuff correctly.
Like 1 hour every two months or so, I just run an ansible playbook and check everything is working ok
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code LTS Long Term Support software version LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
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I just did a big upgrade to my “home lab” (got a new switch and moved it out of my bedroom), which required some maintenance in the days after the upgrade… Running a new ethernet cable, because the old one just couldn’t heck doing gigabit, reconfiguring my router and AP, just general stuff like that.
Other than that and my DHCP/DNS VM sometimes forgetting to autostart after a power outage, pretty much 0 maintenance
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.