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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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[–] jaypg@lemmy.jaypg.pw 18 points 3 weeks ago

First and foremost, backups. Back up everything and back up often. Immutability can’t do anything for critical hardware failure.

Issues happening on something only running container workloads isn’t common but I think it’s worth the extra little effort to reduce the risk even further. Fedora CoreOS or Flatcar is ideal since its declarative nature makes it easily reproducible. Fedora IOT can get you there too, but it doesn’t use ignition so you’ll be setting the server up manually.

Immutability is good. Declarative configuration is good. Manage cattle, not a pet.