There's a whole movement on these 1L pcs: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
At home getting a similarly redundant setup is time, space, and energy consuming. Moreover, most of the home tooling does not have distributed data built in so we need to have a distributed fs or nfs. This brings a whole next level of maintenance and heartache that I simply do not want at home.
Consequently, I run one machine and make backups of the config and hope I can restore it when things go south.
Does anyone have better ideas?
This already solves a lot of issues imo. If something goes down it's not the end of the world. If the machine dies all I have to do is mount the NFS shares and run the compose files.
I run proxmox on my server at home and provision with VM images, like we did in the ancient times. I take regular backups of any extra storage I attach.
I can restore any individual box in an hour or two. It’s no high-availability but it’s good enough for home.
I also have an image for docker-compose like the sibling comment and run anything that “just works” in docker that way.
Someday I might write some lazy terraform to better separate the concerns of VMs and infrastructure, but it’s not a priority.
Proxmox is, in the scheme of things, pretty easy to use. If you can manage instances and images on a VPS you’re most of the way there.
Edit: I also have half a dozen shell scripts that do some basic setup things. These would be replaced by terraform if I ever get around to that.
I figured it would be great for my needs as a transportable PC, instead of a laptop; it was much cheaper.
Boy, do I hate it. It has this whiny fan noise than never stops. And if the CPU needs to do the least bit of work, the fan ramps up even more.
Otherwise, it's a nice little computer. Also, the newer generations – I think starting with gen 6, which look different – seem quieter. They probably realized that having a fan rattle around isn't great.