First my specific questions, down below more info:
- how do you use ansible? Is there a good source for roles or playbooks to set up services? I feel like ansible is 30% more headache right now during config.
- how do you deal with motivation loss?
- how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of choices and information and disciplines (networking, storage, VMS, Linux…) that comes with selfhosting?
- how do you find the sweetspot between ease of use, ease of set up, security, redundancy? I feel like I am maybe too pranaoid to loose my data again (dropped a hard drive many years back, I lost all of my projects)
- maybe overall, how do you manage your perfectionism?
Thanks a lot! I hope you have some insights for me.
More info
Soo I have a motivational push to work on my server every few months for a few weeks or months. I always make progress and I feel like I landed on a good solution by now. Its the third time I redid my setup, everytime I got closet to what feels like the perfect setup for me.
I have a vps for headscale, a home server with proxmox for the rest.
Last push I switched from manually configuring and documenting to ansible. I like ansible, but its also a pain and not as fast to set up my server as just installing it and fiddeling around manually until it works.
My problem is: I want to do it right, so my server is robut with enough redundancy to move all my cloud stuff to it. But I am still kind of a noob and still learning and figuring things out.
My fear is, that if i don’t document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.
So ansible seems like the only valid choice here, together with proxmox to be as flexible and future proof. But I am burnt out again and lost Motivation even though I am close to my first goals and running services.
Thank you for reading :)
I’ve been there plenty of times, you’re not alone. There are two solutions to that problem, really, and it boils down to the classic pet vs cattle.
Pets mean you care about every server. If it breaks, it’s cheaper for you to fix it than redeploy. The overwhelming majority of your setup will be pets. Why? It’s simpler. Things don’t break that often, and when they do, it’s okay to be low-effort in fixing them.
Write docs for yourself, even if it’s just notes on the sequences of commands to run to redeploy things. You will thank yourself when the server finally dies in two years and you have notes on how to bring everything back.
Cattle means there’s no difference between server A and B. Everything is replaceable. Ultimately, whatever you run can run to the same extent in AWS, your basement NAS, or on your desk PC.
Cattle is also a lot of work. You will learn an excruciating amount of things about storage, networking, visualisation, workload scheduling, and such. And it’s easy to be demotivated because of how much there is to learn.
So take it easy. Concur that your hobby world is full of pets, but learn how to do the cattle approach at your leisure. You’ll realise that in every practical cattle setup, there are still pets, and that automating yourself from complexity only means you add layers of it somewhere else.
This is brilliant: “automating yourself from complexity only means you add layers of somewhere else”. Need to tattoo this on my forearm!