I’m working on starting up my first home server which I’m trying to make relatively foolproof and easily recoverable. What is some common maintenance people do to avoid dire problems, including those that accumulate over time, and what are ways to recover a server when issues pop up?
At first, I figured I’d just use debian with some kind of snapshot system and monitor changelogs to update manually when needed, but then I started hearing that immutable distros like microOS and coreOS have some benefits in terms of long term “os drift”, security, and recovering from botched updates or conflicts? I don’t even know if I’m going to install any native packages, I’m pretty certain every service I want to run has a docker image already, so does it matter? I should also mention, I’m going to use this as a file server with snapraid, so I’m trying to figure out if there will be conflicts to look out for there or with hardware acceleration for video transcoding.
I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.
So my advice is to just do it.
You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.
Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.
As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.
Just do it
This! And, baby-steps: don’t go about installing every app you see. Try backup strategies, put them to test (bring service down and up again with data from backup). Play, have fun.
Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.
The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.
Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.
I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker