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

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by skybox@lemm.ee to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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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[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 7 points 3 weeks ago

If your stuff is all Docker then yeah, immutable makes sense as it makes the entire box declarative and immutable: you can get back the exact same operating Docker environment on the server, and then you can get back the exact same Docker workloads going with the Docker compose configurations.

If you ever need to run stuff you'd run on Debian, you can just shove it in a Debian container.

That said, if most of the stuff is containers, the risk of just the core Debian breaking is fairly low. Pick whatever is easiest for you to deal with based on your needs. Immutable distros have a bit of a learning curve.