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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was going towards the "I have an agent do it". glad it didn't :)

What this skips though is the complexity of services like NextCloud (stuck in maintenance mode again?), Immich (needs a compose file edit?), MineCraft worlds (Dad! my client is on another version again!), (dmn) AlbyHub (needs re-login and closed its channel).

But to be fair this is really getting quite minimal these days indeed. I didn't really realize it but I too have a mostly hand-off home-lab... Ok, then it's not really a lab anymore, its more "stable home-infra" ;)

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OP here - I can touch on that. Didn't really expect anyone to read this post, so it was rather brief and just focused on how I've automated out the tedious parts of maintaining my server.

However, I still build new things, launch new services, etc. I personally don't categorize that as maintenance.

In regards to your complexity comment - I have slowly built up experience over the years and now launch services where I very rarely have to edit compose files or such. However, it does happen and I would lump it into that "~15 minutes per month" bucket. I primarily use Nginx + Docker for any service I launch and can quickly diagnose issues and resolve them.

Perhaps another piece I could've mentioned is sticking to a core set of tools like this, which allow me not only to automate the basics, but also to have become adept at fixing things manually if they break.

> NextCloud (stuck in maintenance mode again?)

The frustrating thing is that basically everyone who self hosts Nextcloud will know exactly what you're talking about, and the solution is generally quite simple, and yet the docs for this problem are terrible, scattered, out of date, and mostly just link to old GitHub issues that don't directly address the problem until you get to some comment half way down.

It's a terrible user experience - seriously, point an LLM at it for a few hours to write the first draft of a "So you're stuck in maintenance mode" page, get it reviewed by the community, publish. Immediate quality of life improvement for everyone struggling to get started self hosting it.

As a counterpoint, I’m not sure what everybody is doing to their Nextcloud installs. Many people have problems so I believe they are real, but I’m not sure where I’ve gone so right.

Right now I use Docker compose, with the major version pinned so it doesn’t surprise me. I verify app compatibility before changing that major version.

I use PostgreSQL as the DB.

I've never had real problems with it, and it wasn't for lack of trying.

I've been using Nextcloud since it forked from OwnCloud, and I was running OwnCloud before that. It was on a NAS with 64MB RAM and a 500MHz CPU at one point.

I've run it bare metal, with different Linux distros, on FreeBSD, in VMs, in LXC containers, in Docker containers, with different PHP versions, with different web servers, with different DBs, on terrible hardware, on powerful hardware, more. So many combinations.

I think it's because I am also a long time fan but kept the same system running. But generally it's 1 occ command and the thing is alive again. Always did wonder why the container doesn't run that command... Maybe the AIO container does.

Is this something that happens down the road? I've had nextcloud for probably 6 months now and while technically I've had a couple problems, they were self induced. I haven't heard of/seen maintenance mode.

I think it is happening less and less, it was more in the older days. I'm still on very old install (from somewhere barely after the OwnCloud split), so I saw some issues.

Of course, just before I was ready to wipe it all and start with the AIO container my partner started intensively using the calendar (switching from paper, finally!) So I need to spend some time with it and migrate properly without her having any downsides. When I do I will also set up EuroOffice and experiment with that. I'm rather looking forward to that. In that sense it's a real "lab" :)

Yes, I've been running it for about two years and it happened twice near the start due to automatic updates. In each case it was a couple of occ commands to clear it, but finding the command took quite a while.

> Dad! my client is on another version again!

I ended up moving everyone to Lunar Client, mostly because the Minecraft Launcher from Microsoft still requires Rosetta, and sometimes would just break for unrelated reasons. As a side effect, you can pick the version that launches, upgrade when you want, run old versions as needed. So the server upgrades can be planned instead of an emergency.

Accidentally production.

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