vegetaaaaaaa

• ansible playbook for automated/self-documenting setup
• for one-off bugs or ongoing/long-term problems, open an issue on my gitea instnce and track the investigations and solutions there.

allows my mail clients to connect via IMAP to view and search emails

dovecot will be able to handle this part. This is what I use as a mail archive (once a year, archive all mail from the previous year from various mailboxes to my self-hosted dovecot instance). I wrote this ansible role for it.

downloads new emails via IMAP

As others recommended, imapsync should be able to handle that part.

docker solution

These tools are simple enough to install and manage (one package, one config file), Docker is not needed. If you really need it to fit into your docker-based setup, build and maintain your own images.

What's your existing setup? For such a simple task, check if any of the tools you use currently can be adapted (simple text files on a web server? File sharing like Nextcloud and text files? Pastebin-like? Wiki? ...). Otherwise a simple Shaarli instance could do the trick (just post "notes" aka. bookmarks without an URL). I use this theme to make it nicer. Or maybe a static site generator/blog.

I would never recommend Odoo anymore, given how painful it is to upgrade from a major version to another. Their answer to it is basically "yeah, some complex migrations need to be done, just send us a copy of your database with highly sensitive company data, pay us to do the migration and we'll send it back to you". Yeah, lol, no.

• monitoring: https://github.com/awesome-foss/awesome-sysadmin?tab=readme-ov-file#monitoring
• sending commands: https://github.com/OliveTin/OliveTin

msmtp never failed me

On my desktop I do this with quodlibet alongside the KDE connect applet + KDE connect android app, which lets the phone control media players on the desktop. You probably don't want to run a full desktop environment just for this, but it's a good option if you already have a desktop PC with decent speakers.

Mentioning it just in case, because it works for me. If you're looking for a purely headless server there are other good suggestions in this thread.

You could create the alias alias docker="podman"

There's even an official Debian package that takes care of this for you: https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker

I can manually monitor but it doesn’t happen just then

Setup proper monitoring with history. That way yo don't have to babysit the server, you can just look at the charts after a crash. I usually go with netdata

sftp://USERNAME@SERVER:PORT in the address bar of most file managers will work. You can omit the port if it's the default (22), you can omit the username if it's the same as your local user.

You can also add the server as a favorite/shortcut in your file manager sidebar (it works at least in Thunar and Nautilus). Or you can edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks directly:

file:///some/local/directory
file:///some/other/directory
sftp://my.example.org/home/myuser my.example.org
sftp://otheruser@my.example.net:2222/home/otheruser my.example.net

Syslog over TCP with TLS (don't want those sweet packets containing sensitive data leaving your box unencrypted). Bonus points for mutual authentication between the server/clients (just got it working and it's 👌 - my implementation here

It solves the aggregation part but doesn't solve the viewing/analysis part. I usually use lnav on simple setups (gotty as a poor man's web interface for lnav when needed), and graylog on larger ones (definitely costly in terms of RAM and storage though)

Obfuscation can be helpful in not disclosing which are some services or naming schemes

The "obfuscation" benefits of wildcard certificates are very limited (public DNS records can still easily be found with tools such as sublist3r), and they're definitely a security liability (get the private key of the cert stolen from a single server -> TLS potentially compromised on all your servers using the wildcard cert)