Submitted 6 months ago by ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I recognize this will vary depending on how much you self-host, so I’m curious about the range of experiences from the few self-hosted things to the many self-hosted things.
Also how might you compare it to other maintenance of your other online systems (e.g. personal computer/phone/etc.)?
sometimes I remember I'm self hosting things
As long as you remember before you turn off the computer!
my main PC hosts nothing, everything else is always on
+1 automate your backup rolling, setup your monitoring and alerting and then ignore everything until something actually goes wrong. I touch my lab a handful of times a year when it’s time for major updates, otherwise it basically runs itself.
Very minimal. Mostly just run updates every now and then and fix what breaks which is relatively rare. The Docker stacks in particular are quite painless.
Couple websites, Lemmy, Matrix, a whole email stack, DNS, IRC bouncer, NextCloud, WireGuard, Jitsi, a Minecraft server and I believe that’s about it?
I’m a DevOps engineer at work, managing 2k+ VMs that I can more than keep up with. I’d say it varies more with experience and how it’s set up than how much you manage. When you use Ansible and Terraform and Kubernetes, the count of servers and services isn’t really important. One, five, ten, a thousand servers, it matters very little since you just run Ansible on them and 5 minutes later it’s all up and running.
+1 for docker and minimal maintenance. Only updates or new containers might break stuff. If you don’t touch it, it will be fine. Of course there might be some container specific problems. Depends what you want to run. And I’m not a devops engineer like Max 😅
Same same - just one update a week on Friday btw 2 yawns of the 4VMs and 10-15 services i have + quarterly backup. Does not involve much + the odd ad-hoc re-linking the reverse proxy when containers switch ips on the docker network when the VM restarts/resets
It’s bursty; I tend to do a lot of work on stuff when I do a hardware upgrade, but otherwise it’s set it and forget it for the most part. The only servers I pay any significant attention to in terms of frequent maintenance and security checks are the MTAs in the DMZ for my email. Nothing else is exposed to the internet for inbound traffic except a game server VM that’s segregated (credential-wise and network-wise) from everything else, so if it does get compromised it would be a very minimal danger to the rest of my network. Everything either has automated updates, or for servers I want more control over I manually update them when the mood strikes me or a big vulnerability that affects my software hits the news.
TL;DR If you averaged it over a year, I maybe spend 30-60 minutes a week on self hosting maintenance tasks for 4 physical servers and about 20 VM’s.
Once setup correctly, almost none.
I could spend a lifetime setting up my self hosted stuff correctly.
True, didn't say that it didn't take me an eternity to set it up
Typically, very little. I have ~40 containers in my Docker stack and by in large it just works. I upgrade stuff here and there as needed. I am getting ready to do a hardware refresh but again with Docker that’s pretty painless.
Most of the time spent in my lab is trying out new things. I’ll find a new something that looks cool and go down the rabbit hole with it for a while. Then back to the status quo.
A lot less since I started using docker instead of running separate vms for everything. Less systems to update is bliss.
As others said, the initial setup may consume some time, but once it’s running, it just works. I dockerize almost everything and have automatic backups set up.
For some reason my DNS tends to break the most. I have to reinstall my Pi-hole semi-regularly.
NixOS plus Docker is my preferred setup for hosting applications. Sometime it is a pain to get running but once it does it tends to run. If a container doesn’t work, restart it. If the OS doesn’t work, roll it back.
It’s as much or as little as you want to. If you don’t want to change anything, you can use something like debian and only maintain once every 5 years (and you could even skip that).
I personally spend a little more, by choice, because I use gentoo. But if I’m busy, I can avoid maintenance by only running routine updates every couple of weeks or so.
Mostly nothing, except for Home Assistant, which seems to shit the bed every few months. My other services are Docker containers or Proxmox LXCs that just work.
If you’re not publicly exposing things? I can go months without touching it. Then go through and update everything in an hour or so on the weekend.
And that update destroys everything
Generally, no. Most of the time the updates work without a hitch. The the exception of Nextcloud, which will always break during an upgrade.
I spend a huge amount of time configuring and setting up stuff as it’s my biggest hobby. But I got good enough that when I set something up it can stay for months without any mainainence. Most I do for keeping it up is adding more storage if it turn out to be used more than planned.
Minimal, I have to force myself to check the servers for updates atleast once a week.
Main problem for me is I automated podman and docker uodates with their respectic autouodate mechsnisms and use ntfy for push notifications so I know if a service stops working and I had an update recently on it that it’s an update issue.
Also have uptime monitor wih uptime kuma to monitor state of my services to catch them not working before I do, also ntfy for push notifications.
Also have grafana+prometheus seted up on my buggest server for monitoring and alerting with alertmanager+mail to get notifications on even more errors.
So in general I only have to worry about occasional once every few months error and updates of the host system (debian).
As a complete noob trying to make A TrueNAS server, none and then suddenly lots when idk how to fix something that broke
Not heaps, although I should probably do more than I do. Generally speaking, on Saturday mornings:
unattended-upgrades, so I test inbound functionality on thoseWhat I still want to do is develop some Ansible playbooks to deploy unattended-upgrades across my fleet (~40ish Debian/docker LXCs). I fear I have some tech debt growing on those hosts, but have fallen into the convenient trap of knowing my internet-facing gear is the always up to date, and I can be lazy about the rest.
Too much, just, too much
Maybe 1 hr every month or two to update things.
Thinks like my opnsense router are best updated when no one else is using the network.
The docker containers I like to update manually after checking the release logs. Doesn’t take long and I often find out about cool new features perusing the release notes.
Projects will sometimes have major updates that break things and I strongly prefer having everything super stable until I have time to sit down and update.
I run two local physical servers, one production and one dev (and a third prod2 kept in case of a prod1 failure), and two remote production/backup servers all running Proxmox, and two VPSs. Most apps are dockerised inside LXC containers (on Proxmox) or just docker on Ubuntu (VPSs). Each of the three locations runs a Synology NAS in addition to the server.
Backups run automatically, and I manually run apt updates on everything each weekend with a single ansible playbook. Every host runs a little golang program that exposes the memory and disk use percent as a JSON endpoint, and I use two instances of Uptime Kuma (one local, and one on fly.io) to monitor all of those with keywords.
So - weekly: 10 minutes to run the update playbook, and I usually ssh into the VPS’s, have a look at the Fail2Ban stats and reboot them if needed. I also look at each of the Proxmox GUIs to check the backs have been working as expected. Monthly: stop the local prod machine and switch to the prod2 machine (from backups) for a few days. Probably 30 minutes each way, most of it waiting for backups. From time to time (if I hear of a security update), but generally every three months: Look through my container versions and see if I want to update them. They’re on docker compose so the steps are just backup the LXC, docker down, pull, up - probs 5 minutes per container. Yearly: consider if I need to do operating systems - eg to Proxmox 8, or a new Debian or Ubuntu LTS Yearly: visit the remotes and have a proper check/clean up/updates
love fly.io
fun fact, lemdro.id is hosted entirely on fly.io
If you set it up really well, you’ll probably only need to invest maybe an hour or so every week or two. But it also depends on what kind of maintenance you mean. I spend a lot of time downloading things and putting them in the right place so that my TV is properly entertaining. Is that maintenance? As for updating things, I’ve set up most of that to be automatic. The stuff that’s not automatic, like pulling new docker images, I do every couple weeks. Sometimes that involves running update scripts or changing configs. Usually it’s just a couple commands.
Yeah, to clarify I don’t mean organizing/arranging files as a part of maintenance, moreso handling different installs/configs/updating. Sometimes since more folks come around to ask for help it can appear as if it’s all much more involved to maintain than it may otherwise be (with a mix of the right setups and knowledge to deal with any hiccups).
Synology user running some docker contains.
Very, very little maintenance. If there’s an update for something on docker, a simple click in the container manager, and it’s done. Yes, I can automate, but prefer to manually do these as many of the docker apps I use are in high development and I like to know what’s changing with each version.
Synology packages update easily, and the system updates happen only once in a while. A click and reboot.
I’ve tried to minimize things as much as possible, and to make things easier for me. One day, someone in my family will need to take over, and I don’t want to over-complicate things for them, lest they lose all our family photos, documents, etc.
I probably spend more time keeping the fans on my actual NAS clean of dust, than I do maintaining the software end of things. LOL
For my local media server? Practically none. Maybe restart the system once a month if it starts getting slow. Clear the cache, etc.
When I hosted game servers: Depending on the game, you may have to fix something every few hours. Arma 3 is, by far, the worst. Which really sucks because the games can last really long, and it can be annoying to save and load with the GM tool thing.
When I hosted game servers: Depending on the game, you may have to fix something every few hours. Arma 3 is, by far, the worst. Which really sucks because the games can last really long, and it can be annoying to save and load with the GM tool thing.
Was that a mix of games being more involved and the way their server software was set up, from what you could tell, or…?
Like 1 hour every two months or so, I just run an ansible playbook and check everything is working ok
It’s very minimal in normal use, maybe like an hour or two a month at most.
Maybe 1-2 hours a week for ~23 docker containers, 3 LXCs and proxmox, so not much. Most of that time is spend SSH-ing doing minor updates. Running Debian on everything has been amazing. Stability is just phenomenal.
My mini-pc with Debian runs RunTipi 24/7 with Navidrome, Jellyfin and Tailscale. Once every 2-3 weeks I plug in the monitor to run updates and add/remove some media.
Not much for myself, like many others. But my backups are manual. I have an external drive I backup to and unplug as I intentionally want to keep it completely isolated from the network in case of a breach. Because of that, maybe 10 minutes a week? Running gentoo with tons of scripts and docker containers that I have automatically updating. The only time I need to intervene the updates is when my script sends me a push notification of an eselect news item (like a major upcoming update) or kernel update.
I also use a custom monitoring software I wrote that ties into a MySQL db that’s connected to with grafana for general software, network alerts (new devices connecting to network, suspicious DNS requests, suspicious ports, suspicious countries being reached out to like china, etc) or hardware failures (like a raid drive failing)… So yeah, automate if you know how to script or program, and you’ll be pretty much worry free most of the time.
After my Nextcloud server just killed itself from an update and I ditched that junk software, nearly zero maintenance.
I have
And I have never used any of those … it just runs and keeps running.
I am selfhosting
I moved form next cloud to seafile. The file sync is so much better than next cloud and own cloud.
It has a normal windows client and also a mount type client (seadrive) which is also amazing for large libraries.
I have mine setup with oAuth via Authentik and it works super well.
I actually moved from seafile to nextcloud, because when I have two PCs running simultaneously it would constantly have sync errors and required manually resolving them all the time. Sadly nextcloud wasn’t really better. But I am now looking for solutions that can avoid file conflicts with two simultaneous clients.
If my ISP didn’t constantly break my network from their side, I’d have effectively no downtime and nearly zero maintenance. I don’t live on the bleeding edge and I don’t do anything particularly experimental and most of my containers are as minimal as possible
I built my own x86 router with OpnSense Proxmox hypervisor Cheapo WiFi AP Thinkcentre NAS (just 1 drive, debian with Samba) Containers: Tor relay, gonic, corrade, owot, apache, backups, dns, owncast
All of this just works if I leave it alone
henfredemars@infosec.pub 6 months ago
Huge amounts of daily maintenance because I lack self control and keep changing things.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 6 months ago
highly recommend doing infrastructure-as-code, it makes it really easy to git commit and save a previously working state, so you can backtrack when something goes wrong
kernelle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ansible is great for this!
Kaldo@kbin.social 6 months ago
Got any decent guides on how to do it? I guess a docker compose file can do most of the work there, not sure about volume backups and other dependencies in the OS.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Configure
webhead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I have weekly backups of my VMs in Proxmox. Fuck it lol.
SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 6 months ago
Nightly backups to a repurposed qnap running pbs. I’m fully aware it’s overkill but it gives me some peace of mind.