9 ms·

Opinionated take: "a couple of home servers" are probably the wrong solution to your problem. Almost everything you do as a private person works better, faster,

Opinionated take: "a couple of home servers" are probably the wrong solution to your problem. Almost everything you do as a private person works better, faster, more reliably, and with much less time investment if you use a single machine for it.

Multicomp 2y ago
Yeah I use ansible (in pull mode) for my home automation for just such a purpose. I have the router open up port 443 to my one box, then have haproxy read the header for the incoming traffic and route it to the backend on the box whether a docker container or a local service. Foundry VTT, jellyfin, etc. All from Ansible, all to a private github that I just SSH into the machine long enough to run ansible pull. That way, when I run into errors, it's just rinse and repeat to iterate my ansible playbook code until it is perfectly fit for this exact situation. Is my code maintainable and enterprisey like my work ansible? NOPE. But it's okay, it's my private code that nobody but me uses. I even do direct commits on master because I can, it's my tiny naughty guilty pleasure.
- scott01 2y ago
  Are you routing a traffic from a VPS to your home? I've considered a set up like this where my home PC would be permanently VPN-connected to the VPS, but I think the problem was making it secure, e.g. making a virtual network at home to separate my personal stuff to be potentially accessible from the internet.
  - smackeyacky 2y ago
    Use Tailscale for this
semi-extrinsic 2y ago
This. Also, why run different OSes on your machines? And why the need to reinstall stuff? I just run Arch on everything, and I haven't had to reinstall a machine in many years.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  Only reason I can think of is running native ZFS on the BSDs.
  - NegativeLatency 2y ago
    The ZFS support in Ubuntu has been totally fine for me on my home server. (Boots off of a different ext4 ssd and I have two big spinning disks for my zfs pool)
- scott01 2y ago
  I can't install Arch on OVH Cloud. It's by far my favourite distro, tbh.
  - timenova 2y ago
    There is one solution I've seen being used to solve this issue. It is to overwrite the current Linux OS with the one you want. I came across this idea here [0]. I researched and got Alpine Linux running on Hetzner (even they don't support custom images) using a similar method [1]. This seems to be the guide to do the same with Arch Linux [2], I'm not sure though. Once you do create a successful Arch image on OVH, take a snapshot of the machine before installing anything else, in case you want to start from a fresh Arch image in the future. [0] https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect [1] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Replacing_non-Alpine_Linux_with_Alpine_remotely https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Replacing_non-Alpine_Linux... [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_from_existing_Linux https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_from_exi...
kcartlidge 2y ago
Totally. And whilst I've used most provisioning tools (quite liking packer and terraform), for my own stuff I have a file with notes and snippets. Follow that file and within less than 10 minutes I've got a working server with Postgres, Nginx, and LetsEncrypt, and it's ready for Git push-to-deploy. Simplicity is what you need, for as long as you can get away with it. Simplicity and backups.
- paweladamczuk 2y ago
  Do you happen to keep your script public? I would enjoy taking a look at it to learn something.
fsflover 2y ago
And this single machine could run Qubes OS, which runs many VMs with a great UI and strong isolation. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.

Multicomp 2y ago

Yeah I use ansible (in pull mode) for my home automation for just such a purpose. I have the router open up port 443 to my one box, then have haproxy read the header for the incoming traffic and route it to the backend on the box whether a docker container or a local service. Foundry VTT, jellyfin, etc. All from Ansible, all to a private github that I just SSH into the machine long enough to run ansible pull. That way, when I run into errors, it's just rinse and repeat to iterate my ansible playbook code until it is perfectly fit for this exact situation. Is my code maintainable and enterprisey like my work ansible? NOPE. But it's okay, it's my private code that nobody but me uses. I even do direct commits on master because I can, it's my tiny naughty guilty pleasure.

scott01 2y ago
Are you routing a traffic from a VPS to your home? I've considered a set up like this where my home PC would be permanently VPN-connected to the VPS, but I think the problem was making it secure, e.g. making a virtual network at home to separate my personal stuff to be potentially accessible from the internet.
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  Use Tailscale for this

semi-extrinsic 2y ago

This. Also, why run different OSes on your machines? And why the need to reinstall stuff? I just run Arch on everything, and I haven't had to reinstall a machine in many years.

matheusmoreira 2y ago
Only reason I can think of is running native ZFS on the BSDs.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  The ZFS support in Ubuntu has been totally fine for me on my home server. (Boots off of a different ext4 ssd and I have two big spinning disks for my zfs pool)
scott01 2y ago
I can't install Arch on OVH Cloud. It's by far my favourite distro, tbh.
- timenova 2y ago
  There is one solution I've seen being used to solve this issue. It is to overwrite the current Linux OS with the one you want. I came across this idea here [0]. I researched and got Alpine Linux running on Hetzner (even they don't support custom images) using a similar method [1]. This seems to be the guide to do the same with Arch Linux [2], I'm not sure though. Once you do create a successful Arch image on OVH, take a snapshot of the machine before installing anything else, in case you want to start from a fresh Arch image in the future. [0] https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect [1] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Replacing_non-Alpine_Linux_with_Alpine_remotely https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Replacing_non-Alpine_Linux... [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_from_existing_Linux https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_from_exi...

kcartlidge 2y ago

Totally. And whilst I've used most provisioning tools (quite liking packer and terraform), for my own stuff I have a file with notes and snippets. Follow that file and within less than 10 minutes I've got a working server with Postgres, Nginx, and LetsEncrypt, and it's ready for Git push-to-deploy. Simplicity is what you need, for as long as you can get away with it. Simplicity and backups.

paweladamczuk 2y ago
Do you happen to keep your script public? I would enjoy taking a look at it to learn something.

fsflover 2y ago

And this single machine could run Qubes OS, which runs many VMs with a great UI and strong isolation. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.