How much maintenance do you find your self-hosting involves?

I recognize this will vary depending on how much you self-host, so I'm curious about the range of experiences from the few self-hosted things to the many self-hosted things.

Also how might you compare it to other maintenance of your other online systems (e.g. personal computer/phone/etc.)?

CatTrickery ,

Since scrapping systemd, a hell of a lot less but it can occasionally be a bit of messing about when my dynamic ip gets reassigned.

CarbonatedPastaSauce ,

It's bursty; I tend to do a lot of work on stuff when I do a hardware upgrade, but otherwise it's set it and forget it for the most part. The only servers I pay any significant attention to in terms of frequent maintenance and security checks are the MTAs in the DMZ for my email. Nothing else is exposed to the internet for inbound traffic except a game server VM that's segregated (credential-wise and network-wise) from everything else, so if it does get compromised it would be a very minimal danger to the rest of my network. Everything either has automated updates, or for servers I want more control over I manually update them when the mood strikes me or a big vulnerability that affects my software hits the news.

TL;DR If you averaged it over a year, I maybe spend 30-60 minutes a week on self hosting maintenance tasks for 4 physical servers and about 20 VM's.

Presi300 ,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

I just did a big upgrade to my "home lab" (got a new switch and moved it out of my bedroom), which required some maintenance in the days after the upgrade... Running a new ethernet cable, because the old one just couldn't heck doing gigabit, reconfiguring my router and AP, just general stuff like that.

Other than that and my DHCP/DNS VM sometimes forgetting to autostart after a power outage, pretty much 0 maintenance

Max_P , (edited )
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

Very minimal. Mostly just run updates every now and then and fix what breaks which is relatively rare. The Docker stacks in particular are quite painless.

Couple websites, Lemmy, Matrix, a whole email stack, DNS, IRC bouncer, NextCloud, WireGuard, Jitsi, a Minecraft server and I believe that's about it?

I'm a DevOps engineer at work, managing 2k+ VMs that I can more than keep up with. I'd say it varies more with experience and how it's set up than how much you manage. When you use Ansible and Terraform and Kubernetes, the count of servers and services isn't really important. One, five, ten, a thousand servers, it matters very little since you just run Ansible on them and 5 minutes later it's all up and running. I don't use that for my own servers out of laziness but still, I set most of that stuff 10 years ago and it's still happily humming along just fine.

jaykay ,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

+1 for docker and minimal maintenance. Only updates or new containers might break stuff. If you don’t touch it, it will be fine. Of course there might be some container specific problems. Depends what you want to run. And I’m not a devops engineer like Max 😅

b763e622 ,

Same same - just one update a week on Friday btw 2 yawns of the 4VMs and 10-15 services i have + quarterly backup.
Does not involve much + the odd ad-hoc re-linking the reverse proxy when containers switch ips on the docker network when the VM restarts/resets

DeltaTangoLima , (edited )
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

Not heaps, although I should probably do more than I do. Generally speaking, on Saturday mornings:

  • Between 2am-4am, Watchtower on all my docker hosts pulls updated images for my containers, and notifies me via Slack then, over coffee when I get up:
    • For containers I don't care about, Watchtower auto-updates them as well, at which point I simply check the service is running and purge the old images
    • For mission-critical containers (Pi-hole, Home Assistant, etc), I manually update the containers and verify functionality, before purging old images
  • I then check for updates on my OPNsense firewall, and do a controlled update if required (needs me to jump onto a specific wireless SSID to be able to do so)
  • Finally, my two internet-facing hosts (Nginx reverse proxy and Wireguard VPN server) auto-update their OS and packages using unattended-upgrades, so I test inbound functionality on those

What I still want to do is develop some Ansible playbooks to deploy unattended-upgrades across my fleet (~40ish Debian/docker LXCs). I fear I have some tech debt growing on those hosts, but have fallen into the convenient trap of knowing my internet-facing gear is the always up to date, and I can be lazy about the rest.

Showroom7561 , (edited )

Synology user running some docker containers.

Very, very little maintenance. If there's an update for something on docker, a simple click in the container manager, and it's done. Yes, I can automate, but prefer to manually do these as many of the docker apps I use are in high development and I like to know what's changing with each version.

Synology packages update easily, and the system updates happen only once in a while. A click and reboot.

I've tried to minimize things as much as possible, and to make things easier for me. One day, someone in my family will need to take over, and I don't want to over-complicate things for them, lest they lose all our family photos, documents, etc.

I probably spend more time keeping the fans on my actual NAS clean of dust, than I do maintain the software end of things. LOL

edit: spelling

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
AP WiFi Access Point
DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network
DNS Domain Name Service/System
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
IP Internet Protocol
LTS Long Term Support software version
LXC Linux Containers
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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drkt ,
@drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

If my ISP didn't constantly break my network from their side, I'd have effectively no downtime and nearly zero maintenance. I don't live on the bleeding edge and I don't do anything particularly experimental and most of my containers are as minimal as possible

I built my own x86 router with OpnSense
Proxmox hypervisor
Cheapo WiFi AP
Thinkcentre NAS (just 1 drive, debian with Samba)
Containers: Tor relay, gonic, corrade, owot, apache, backups, dns, owncast

All of this just works if I leave it alone

0110010001100010 ,
@0110010001100010@lemmy.world avatar

Typically, very little. I have ~40 containers in my Docker stack and by in large it just works. I upgrade stuff here and there as needed. I am getting ready to do a hardware refresh but again with Docker that's pretty painless.

Most of the time spent in my lab is trying out new things. I'll find a new something that looks cool and go down the rabbit hole with it for a while. Then back to the status quo.

mhzawadi ,

I have just been round my small setup and run an OS update, took about an hour. That includes a reboot of a dedicated server with OVH.

a pi and mini PC at home, a dedi at OVH running 2 LXC and 5 qemu vms. All deb a mix of 11 and 12.

I spend Wednesday evenings checking what updates need installing, I get an email every week from newreleases.io with software updates and run Semaphore to check on OS updates.

mikyopii ,
@mikyopii@programming.dev avatar

For some reason my DNS tends to break the most. I have to reinstall my Pi-hole semi-regularly.

NixOS plus Docker is my preferred setup for hosting applications. Sometime it is a pain to get running but once it does it tends to run. If a container doesn't work, restart it. If the OS doesn't work, roll it back.

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