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

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

I mostly use debian + docker or alpine + docker for this kind of thing (usually running as VMs on a proxmox server). Both are utterly reliable in my experience, though I've been tending more often toward alpine these days, because it's just so light and simple. I haven't tried any of the immutable systems, in the general spirit of why fix what's not broken. I don't even bother with snapshotting either, though that's mostly because I use some of the proxmox tools for backing up the VMs.