Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?
I think I just have too much going in my “lab” the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it’s more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it’s a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don’t have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don’t seem worth it.
I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.
Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it’s never ending…
It can absolutely be overwhelming, and very easy to forget specifics over a long time. It’s partly why I don’t really go for CLI apps, and ~all of my apps are just Ansible manifests. Which apps are causing the biggest problems for your family?
What exactly is breaking each of these times? Guides that cover 95% sound pretty solid to me. It’s hard to write a guide covering 100% of scenarios. Admittedly I also worked in the field, but the field is extremely wide so maybe there’s some knowledge areas to deepen that are commonly giving you problems and/or move towards a less brittle setup.
Re-evaluating what’s important is important. If it’s not fun then you should reflect on having the right balance of what is helping you and your family vs causing excessive stress. IMO the “avoid all tech companies” is slightly overblown (blasphemous, I know). It’s a good guiding principle but it’s fine to “buy services” that make your life better. For example, I self host a lot, but I was totally fine buying a finances tracking app (the spreadsheet-based one) because it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting that I can’t reasonably do myself at the level of convenience I want.
Well, I’ll share an example. Choosing between Traccar and OwnTracks. I’ve run a lot of stuff on Raspberry Pis, I like it, but, do I keep setting up new devices just to continue more devices or do I dump some for a Linux desktop and move a lot to containers? But that’s more work lol. Aren’t there different versions of docker, too? I recall fucking a service up one time using the wrong documentation once.
I think part of my problem is I’ve pieced stuff together slowly and it feels like a fragile balance, but at work I’ve got more access to resources… And budget lol
I paid around 200€ for a used HP OEM desktop machine. It got a i7 9700 and 32 GB of RAM in it. Still idles at a pretty low power consumption. But I never have to worry about resources, haha. I come from a long history of windows, just recently switched one of my main PCs over to Linux. I like a GUI, still. I got unraid for my server, back when the lifetime licences were still the norm. Makes it really easy to manage services, especially in conjunction with storage (say Immich or Navidrome). Containers and VMs are managed via a GUI and super easy to set up. I work IT-adjacent, but I’m far from being as professional as probably most people here, so this works fine for me.