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 use debian VMs and create rootless podman containers for everything. Here’s my collection so far.

I’m currently in the process of learning how to combine this with ansible… that would save me some time when migrating servers/instances.

Debian + nginx + docker (compose).

That’s usually enough for me. I have all my docker compose files in their respective containers in the home directory like ~/red-discordbot/docker-compose.yml.

The only headache I’ve dealt with are permissions because I have to run docker as root and it makes a lot of messy permissions in the home directories. I’ve been trying rootless docker earlier and it’s been great so far.

edit: I also use rclone for backups.

For personal Linux servers, I tend to run Debian or Ubuntu, with a pretty simple “base” setup that I just run through manually in my head.

• Setup my personal account.
• Upload my SSH keys.
• Configure the hostname (usually after something in Star Trek 🖖).
• Configure the /etc/hotss file.
• Make sure it is fully patched.
• Setup ZeroTier.
• Setup Telegraf to ship some metrics.
• Reboot.

I don’t automate any of this because I don’t see a whole of point in doing it.

raspberry pi, arch linux, docker-compose. I really need to look up ansible

About two years ago my set up had gotten out of control, as it will. Closet full of crap all running vms all poorly managed by chef. Different linux flavors everywhere.

Now its one big physical ubuntu box. Everything gets its own ubuntu VM. These days if I can’t do it in shell scripts and xml I’m annoyed. Anything fancier than that i’d better be getting paid. I document in markdown as i go and rsync the important stuff from each VM to an external every night. Something goes wrong i just burn the vm, copy paste it back together in a new one from the mkdocs site. Then get on with my day.

I use NixOS on almost all my servers, with declarative configuration. I can also install my config in one command with NixOS-Anywhere

It allows me to improve my setup bit by bit without having to keep track of what I did on specific machines

Right now, I just flash ubuntu server to whatever computer it is, ssh and yolo lmao. no containers, no managers, just me, my servers, and a vpn, raw dogging the internet lmao. The box is running a nas, jellyfin, lemmy, and a print server; the laptop a minecraft server, and the pi is running a pihole, and a website that controls gpio that controls the lights. In the pictured setup i dont have access to the apartment complex’s router, so i vpn through a openvpn server i setup in a digitalocean server.

i didnt even know what a container was until i setup the lemmy server, which i just used ansible for.

i still dont really know what ansible is.

Usually Debian as base, then ansible to setup openssh for accessandd for the longest time, I just ran docker-compose straight on bare metal, these days though, I prefer k3s.

I use the following procedure with ansible.

1. Setup the server with the things I need for k3s to run
2. Setup k3s
3. Bootstrap and create all my services on k3s via ArgoCD

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 all in on docker-compose + rootless podman. Definitely not no issues, but I’ve got the hang of the kinds of issues it presents at this point. They’re mostly around SELinux and networking, though generally the networking only gets problematic on exotic compose setups - jitsi was a huge pain for me.

Raw server with SSH and an immutable OS too. I’m using fedora IOT for my homeserver, and apart from some initial issues with GPU drivers because of layering issues (now working) that’s been basically flawless.

I was on OpenSuse MicroOS, but I had huge problems with BTRFS and decided to give it up in favour of EXT4 + XFS. That necessitated moving distro, because MicroOS uses BTRFS snapshots as the basis for its auto-updating/green/blue system. Fedora IOT uses rpm-ostree instead, and works on any filesystem.

After many years of tinkering, I finally gave in and converted my whole stack over to UnRAID a few years ago. You know what? It’s awesome, and I wish I had done it sooner. It automates so many of the more tedious aspects of home server management. I work in IT, so for me it’s less about scratching the itch and more about having competent hosting of services I consider mission-critical. UnRAID lets me do that easily and effectively.

Most of my fun stuff is controlled through Docker and VMs via UnRAID, and I have a secondary external Linux server which handles some tasks I don’t want to saddle UnRAID with (PFSense, Adblocking, etc). The UnRAID server itself has 128GB RAM and dual XEON CPUs, so plenty of go for my home projects. I’m at 12TB right now but I was just on Amazon eyeing some 8TB drives…

Proxmox, then create LXC for everything (moslty debian and a bit of alpine), no automation, full yolo, if it break I have backup (problems are for future me eh)

Generally, it’s Proxmox, debían, then whatever is needed for what I’m spinning up. Usually Docker Compose.

Lately I’ve been playing some with Ansible, but it’s use is far from common for me right now.