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How to avoid "things going wrong"? (Immutable distros?) (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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I'm working on starting up my first home server which I'm trying to make relatively foolproof and easily recoverable. What is some common maintenance people do to avoid dire problems, including those that accumulate over time, and what are ways to recover a server when issues pop up?

At first, I figured I'd just use debian with some kind of snapshot system and monitor changelogs to update manually when needed, but then I started hearing that immutable distros like microOS and coreOS have some benefits in terms of long term "os drift", security, and recovering from botched updates or conflicts? I don't even know if I'm going to install any native packages, I'm pretty certain every service I want to run has a docker image already, so does it matter? I should also mention, I'm going to use this as a file server with snapraid, so I'm trying to figure out if there will be conflicts to look out for there or with hardware acceleration for video transcoding.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

dire problems, including those that accumulate over time

That's not a thing. You create problems over time by experimening in what is, effectively, production load. If all you ever did was install any distro and kept it up to date - not much can break. Granted - shit happens, but it's incredibly rare.

As an example - I've set up my mail server in May 2019. Chose archlinux, because I never wanted to go through a big upgrade. The only exta software installed there is mail-server related. Direct from the repos. I've become confident enough that now there's a nightly cronjob to update the system with a hook to reboot if kernel or init gets updated.

In all those 5 a bit years I've had one issue where I hqd to revert a kernel update.

Another example is tang on an ubuntu server. This was at a previous workplace, but essentially it's a piece of software from the repos. Originally installed on 16.04, has gone without reprovisioning all the way to 22.04. I've now left the company, but I hear it's still running.

Upgrading an ubuntu desktop fleet with a myriad of custom software, on the other hand... let's just not talk about it.