First my specific questions, down below more info:

  • how do you use ansible? Is there a good source for roles or playbooks to set up services? I feel like ansible is 30% more headache right now during config.
  • how do you deal with motivation loss?
  • how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of choices and information and disciplines (networking, storage, VMS, Linux…) that comes with selfhosting?
  • how do you find the sweetspot between ease of use, ease of set up, security, redundancy? I feel like I am maybe too pranaoid to loose my data again (dropped a hard drive many years back, I lost all of my projects)
  • maybe overall, how do you manage your perfectionism?

Thanks a lot! I hope you have some insights for me.

More info

Soo I have a motivational push to work on my server every few months for a few weeks or months. I always make progress and I feel like I landed on a good solution by now. Its the third time I redid my setup, everytime I got closet to what feels like the perfect setup for me.

I have a vps for headscale, a home server with proxmox for the rest.

Last push I switched from manually configuring and documenting to ansible. I like ansible, but its also a pain and not as fast to set up my server as just installing it and fiddeling around manually until it works.

My problem is: I want to do it right, so my server is robut with enough redundancy to move all my cloud stuff to it. But I am still kind of a noob and still learning and figuring things out.

My fear is, that if i don’t document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.

So ansible seems like the only valid choice here, together with proxmox to be as flexible and future proof. But I am burnt out again and lost Motivation even though I am close to my first goals and running services.

Thank you for reading :)

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    4·
    7 days ago

    You’re doing fine.

    After seeing someone at work burnout, I’ll offer this advice:

    Find what you enjoy doing and do nothing more (today). Itch only 1 scratch at a time.

    As an analogy - consider you’ve moved into a newly built house and have an empty garden. No-one would expect you to create that perfectly first time around. Esp. in 1 weekend. It needs time to grow. Some things will need cutting down, some things will need moving. Animals will crap on it.

    I think you’re trying to make it perfect, first time around. Perhaps as a fear of doing it “wrong”.

    There is no wrong, it’s all a learning experience, doing things good enough for now and improving / breaking things later.

    Ensure you know how to backup your files (3-2-1 rule) and the rest doesn’t matter.

    I’ve re-written my ansible scripts a few times, but over months and years as I’ve learned what works best for my system.

    For example, I had 1 complete script for each device. I can wipe the device (get it back on the network) and rebuild with no effort…

    … then I realised that most of the scripts had very similar parts to tweak SSH and other settings, so then I learned how to call scripts from within scripts, which also meant using variables (facts) to work out if this is a 32b or 64b RasPi (for example)

    That probably took 3 months

    But I enjoy sitting in my garden and looking at it…