How do you set up a server? Do you do any automation or do you just open up an SSH session and YOLO? Any containers? Is docker-compose enough for you or are you one of those unicorns who had no issues whatsoever with rootless Podman? Do you use any premade scripts or do you hand craft it all? What distro are you building on top of?
I’m currently in process of “building” my own server and I’m kinda wondering how “far” most people are going, where do y’all take any shortcuts, and what do you spend effort getting just right.
Up until now I’ve been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I’m strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it’s all set up right, it’s never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.
Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that’s just because I’ve got a bit of experience with it.
I’m a lazy piece of shit and containers give me cancer, so I just keep iptables aggressive and spin up whatever on an Ubuntu box that gets upgrades when I feel like wasting a weekend in my underwear.
I’ve recently switched my entire self hosted infrastructure to NixOS, but only after a few years of evaluation, because it’s quite a paradigm shift but well worth it imho.
Before that I used to stick to a solid base of Debian with some docker containers. There are still a few of those remaining that I have yet to migrate to my NixOS infra (namely mosquitto, gotify, nodered and portainer for managing them).
I use the following procedure with ansible.
- Setup the server with the things I need for k3s to run
- Setup k3s
- Bootstrap and create all my services on k3s via ArgoCD
Debian netinst via PXE, SSH/YOLO, docker + compose (formerly swarm), scripts are from my own library, Debian.
I do the same except I boot a usb installer instead of PXE.
I can never find a USB drive when I need one, thus my PXE server was born. lol
Raspberry Pi with Alpine Linux and Docker containers. The thing really flies! While I try to keep it light I’m sometimes shocked how much stuff I can cram into Docker.
I like to use a host-based Postgres and Unbound from the package manager though; I advertise Unbound as the LAN DNS server to offer encryption.
(Rambling here: On my personal devices though I bypass that resolver and use one hosted on Fly (an Alpine Linux Docker image to be exact) so I can block ads, tracking and all that trash.)
