Last time I posted a full writeup on my lab (The before before this) there was a lot of questions on what exactly I was running at home. So here is a full writeup on everything I am running, and how you can run it too
With this amount of servers it seems to be quite a job running and managing all of these. I am running just a few containers and struggle sometimes when there is a major version upgrade to get everything back up running.
How much time do you spend on maintenance for these machines and do you have a tool for it or is it just plain command line? 😯
Monitoring is the key. I use Zabbix, but essentially you want to gather metrics and report on issues.
Once things are set up and working, even with 10s of VMs and applications, it’s quite reliable. The biggest things that catch you out are updates breaking functionality, updates requiring additional manual steps, running out of disk space or expired certificates.
I find I get a spurt of energy to recreate or implement a new system every few months but things just tick over in the meantime.
Not really, I just update containers via Portainer and update the OS with a bash script. Once every few weeks I just roll through them all, only takes 30 mins at most
For automated container updates I can highly recommend watchtower. It also works with updates for specific releases/versions where you’re not using the :latest tag. It was also relatively easy to configure for my small setup of 15 containers.
