Hello everyone!
I did it. I reached a point where I got everything exactly how I wanted and now… Now I am dissatisfied as I look over my home lab’s chaotic mess of a setup. This was my first time selfhosting things, and I learned a ton of stuff. I’ll probably want to tear it down and start anew in the near future, being much tidier and mindful of what goes where.
Does anyone have any tips they want to impart to someone who’s not an entire newbie but still learning stuff? Kind of a “If I could tell myself this before I set everything up, I would say…”
Make it maintainable.
Documentation. Or implicit documentation with ansible or the like (opentofu).
Separate things with LXCs or VMs or OSI containers. Maybe firewalls (ufw) and VLANs to separate them. Incus is nice. As someone already said: Leave the host system mostly vanilla. Services go in the virtual boxes and containers.
Btw: Nix looks promising, too. But I have not opened that can of worms, yet.
Backups…
Automation. unattended-upgrades,
watchtower(unmaintained) or the like. So you don’t have to do it yourself and then forget about it. Claude is looming on the horizon. It will bring many bugs to light and code the exploit for it in no time if someone asks for it nicely.