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I've been running Flatcar Linux as my home server OS since it was CoreOS (which was later acquired by redhat and rebased onto ostree -- Flatcar kept the A/B par

I've been running Flatcar Linux as my home server OS since it was CoreOS (which was later acquired by redhat and rebased onto ostree -- Flatcar kept the A/B partition setup so it was nice to be able to directly upgrade to it.) You set a maintenance window for the reboots and then basically you don't need to touch it. I keep all my docker-compose files in github and just have them all set to launch on boot. linuxserver.io has well maintained images for just about everything you'd want to run at home. Both Fedora CoreOS (ostree based) and openSUSE's MicroOS are the same way, they give you a kernel, systemd, and a container runtime and then the workload is decoupled into containers, it's a nice setup.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I've been looking for something very similar to this for a while. Do you have a writeup for your setup? Also, how does Flatcar's immutability work? TFA mentioned that MicroOS is based on btrfs snapshots, but it didn't give any indication about how Flatcar worked (nor did the Flatcar GitHub readme). Do you know of any comparisons between Flatcar, CoreOS, and MicroOS? Also, any idea which of these work with Raspberry Pis?
- jcastro 4y ago
  Flatcar uses 2 partitions, A and B, you boot into one and then updates update the one that you're not booted into, when you reboot it it boots into the updated one. It's like Android: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab I maintain an awesome-list of immutable resources with a collection of talks and presentations from the people making the stuff. They do a better job explaining it than I can in an hn comment: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable However the list is currently focused on desktop stuff since this is a fairly common pattern in cloud already, I should probably write it up. Semi-related, a few of us have started a community around composable OCI fedora images, and one of our images is intended to be used as a home server built on CoreOS with ZFS, cockpit, and all the goodies you'd need. It's still fresh and we're looking for help if anyone's interested: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore (Disclaimer: I helped start this project)
  - jpeeler 4y ago
    Whenever I was looking at using CoreOS, I was somewhat disheartened that automatic reboots weren't built in: https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/2831 https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/2831. Has this changed? I know zincati has maintenance window support, which would also be nice to have.
jacooper 4y ago
The problem is that docker in the microOS repos is out of date, yes its based on tumbleweed, but still its not comparable to the official docker repo. Also its hard to find cloud providers offering microOS. The best way seems to just treat an Ubuntu/Debian system as an immutable one, using unattended-upgrades for everything

throwaway894345 4y ago

I've been looking for something very similar to this for a while. Do you have a writeup for your setup? Also, how does Flatcar's immutability work? TFA mentioned that MicroOS is based on btrfs snapshots, but it didn't give any indication about how Flatcar worked (nor did the Flatcar GitHub readme). Do you know of any comparisons between Flatcar, CoreOS, and MicroOS? Also, any idea which of these work with Raspberry Pis?

jcastro 4y ago
Flatcar uses 2 partitions, A and B, you boot into one and then updates update the one that you're not booted into, when you reboot it it boots into the updated one. It's like Android: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab I maintain an awesome-list of immutable resources with a collection of talks and presentations from the people making the stuff. They do a better job explaining it than I can in an hn comment: https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable https://github.com/castrojo/awesome-immutable However the list is currently focused on desktop stuff since this is a fairly common pattern in cloud already, I should probably write it up. Semi-related, a few of us have started a community around composable OCI fedora images, and one of our images is intended to be used as a home server built on CoreOS with ZFS, cockpit, and all the goodies you'd need. It's still fresh and we're looking for help if anyone's interested: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore (Disclaimer: I helped start this project)
- jpeeler 4y ago
  Whenever I was looking at using CoreOS, I was somewhat disheartened that automatic reboots weren't built in: https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/2831 https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/2831. Has this changed? I know zincati has maintenance window support, which would also be nice to have.

jacooper 4y ago

The problem is that docker in the microOS repos is out of date, yes its based on tumbleweed, but still its not comparable to the official docker repo. Also its hard to find cloud providers offering microOS. The best way seems to just treat an Ubuntu/Debian system as an immutable one, using unattended-upgrades for everything