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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

I’m always at a loss at home. At work we treat everything as cattle. Nodes get provisioned at boot, we have gazillions of them, and they are all managed. (On a different physical lan, mind you.) redundancy of state is provided on the software level by the database (s).

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?

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I’m a lazy sysadim at home, here’s what I do.

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.

Everything I run on my home server is through docker (compose). The data directories are mounted via NFS on my NAS - that data gets backed up to Amazon Glacier (in case my house burns down or something) + an external HDD plugged into the NAS.

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 have 3 computers and stuff my files in onedrive and github + various less important cloud services. I can just log on to onedrive on a new machine if one of them dies. I have 2 aging thinkpads that work «well enough» for most uses, including the kids’ homework (which is on google something). Since I have multiple, I can tolerate one dying.

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