ZagorathI made my home lab immutable with Terraform | XDA
CompactFlaxThe advantage to using something like terraform is repeatability, reliability across environments and roll-backs.
How much fucking work do you do at home anyways? The last thing I want to see when I clock out is another terminal screen. I’ve been doing this too long.
That’s not what I meant. I can self host without building layers upon layers of infrastructure and infrastructure management tools.
In fact your post could be misconstrued to suggest that if you can’t build out a home server cluster with enterprise tooling and automated deployment as in TFA, you shouldn’t self-host. Realistically, it’s not necessary.
The last thing I want to see when I clock out is another terminal screen.
I’m reacting to this mostly. Self-hosters are a bit of an obnoxious blend of people who want turnkey-but-not-Google solutions and people willing to learn how to do things. People whining about “having to use a terminal” are generally in the former category.
I get that. It’s never been easier to self host with minimal knowledge and people still say it’s too hard.
I deal with the tech all day. I get paid to. I’d rather spend my leisure time touching grass, but I’m at that point in my career where it’s difficult to get excited like I do in my 20s.
You’re implying that self hosting has to be a certain way.
I don’t need to be able to rebuild an engine to be into customizing my car.
The advantage to using something like terraform is repeatability, reliability across environments and roll-backs.
Very valuable for a stress-free life, especially is this is for more than just entertainment and gimmicks. I’d rather stare at the terminal screen for many hours than suddenly having to do it when I don’t for 1.. 2… 3… (oh god damn the networking was relying on having changed that weird undocumented parameter i forgot about years ago wasnt it)
I get that but the setup investment. Wow. I’ve built out my services exactly once, so I don’t really see the value for myself.
Well, like i said, I don’t wanna stare at a terminal at home. I’m running too many services as it is.
Automate the updates with a cron job and use family for outage notifications.
cecilkorikThat’s the problem, When you’re running too many services as it is, you will be staring at a terminal at home sooner or later. Maybe you’ve gotten lucky and haven’t been ravaged by the cruel gods of fate yet, but it absolutely happens, and eventually it will happen to you. When you’re relying on family notifications and disaster response, you don’t get to choose when that happens, and sometimes you’ll have to spend a LONG time staring at a terminal at home. And when it happens often enough, or badly enough, you end up not just staring at the terminal at home, but also thinking about the terminal at home, and losing sleep over it, and that’s just not a great way to live your self-hosting life. I’ve been there.
Making the investment in repeatable, reproducible, maintainable infrastructure now means you get to decide WHEN you’re staring at a terminal, and for exactly how long. Even when you don’t make it through as much progress as you wanted to, you can just close it down without any stress, get back to your life and continue from where you left off next time. You can’t do that, at least not without some significant consequences when your server got hacked and is sending spam or your entire server is refusing to boot and you need the files on it.
You may still have to hit the terminal sometimes when you don’t choose to, but it’s going to be less often, and less complex when you do. That’s when the investment pays off, and your return on investment is the goal of having ultimately less time spent at the terminal at home, and that payoff is especially rewarding if you’re good at prioritizing the time you do choose to spend on the terminal at home, to find low-value moments to effectively repurpose for this hobby, and save the actually valuable times of your life from ever having to be used for emergency maintenance.