Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-23)

The Big Idea

  • Move from Debian to something on the main server.
  • Noodling on what that something might be …
  • Two main yet conflicting needs are
    1. It should be stable and boring and well known like Debian
    2. It should be amenable to being controlled with code
  • One approach will be to just having an OS that is completely configurable.
    NixOS beckons. But I think that is a project for a machine at home, not for something that I want to run on the wide net and in production. (this is just a matter of comfort and opinion. Not fact. Other folks routinely do run workloads on the net with NixOS)
  • The other approach is what I’m doing. Nothing matches what I’m looking for more than Talos. But I’m a bit hesitant, because at least now, Talos (despite the MPL) is Sidero Labs. Not community owned like Debian.
  • After a bit of thought, well, if this is the risk to take, I’ll take it. And see how it goes. After all, I say I want something long term, but in the long term I figure out said something’s shortcomings (like I hate not being able to update Debian like an appliance) and then want to switch anyway.
  • So, I already learned all about containers and how to create and write them last year. So this year, the big change, in addition to Talos is Cilium.
  • The other thing I’m dropping is provisioning the Hetzner instance with OpenTofu/Terraform. A single node does not quite warrant that level of work.
    Am pushing this to when I scale this up to AWS.
  • Think the VM should handle this. My current idle load seems to hover at a few % cpu and about 50% of my 8gb ram

Tentative Plan

  • [ ] Create a Hetzner instance with Talos and Kubernetes on it
  • [ ] Cilium
  • [ ] Flux
  • [ ] Traefik
  • [ ] Letsencrypt
  • [ ] Move workloads from the other cluster to this one. (Examine and drop the ones I don’t need)

2026-10-23 17:20

  • Got the instance up with Talos installed. Now to figure out more next week.