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.
I used proxmox and have played a little with nix and guix, but simplest is just use debian, put /home on a separate logical partition from the system partition so you can reinstall the system without clobbering user files, and as people keep saying, backup early and often.