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.)?

77 points
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Huge amounts of daily maintenance because I lack self control and keep changing things that were previously working.

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20 points

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

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7 points

Ansible is great for this!

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6 points

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.

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2 points

Sorry I replied to the parent comment, but check out Ansible

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1 point

I have weekly backups of my VMs in Proxmox. Fuck it lol.

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Nightly backups to a repurposed qnap running pbs. I’m fully aware it’s overkill but it gives me some peace of mind.

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2 points

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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0 points
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53 points

sometimes I remember I’m self hosting things

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7 points

As long as you remember before you turn off the computer!

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11 points

I don’t understand. “Turn… off?”

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5 points

neofetch proudly displaying 5 months of uptime

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3 points

my main PC hosts nothing, everything else is always on

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3 points

+1 automate your backup rolling, setup your monitoring and alerting and then ignore everything until something actually goes wrong. I touch my lab a handful of times a year when it’s time for major updates, otherwise it basically runs itself.

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38 points
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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.

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4 points

+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 😅

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1 point

Same same - just one update a week on Friday btw 2 yawns of the 4VMs and 10-15 services i have + quarterly backup. Does not involve much + the odd ad-hoc re-linking the reverse proxy when containers switch ips on the docker network when the VM restarts/resets

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12 points

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.

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12 points

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.

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