New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss

Ask HN: Please recommend how to manage personal serverss
5 by scott01 | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey guys, I'm not an infrastructure engineer nor do I work in web, but I'm pretty comfortable with Linux. I realised I need to spin up a couple of home servers and VPSs to simplify and localise my digital life, and I have an RPi and an x86 NAS in my home network, and a VPS in the cloud. They run different hardware and distros, so I have to set them up a bit differently, which is a pain of itself, but what makes matters worse is a situation when I mess something up real bad or when there's another reason that essentially forces me to reinstall. I tried Ansible and find it hard to use. E.g. at some point I decided to redeploy my server to a different VPS type in the same cloud, but I had to patch my Ansible scripts to do so, even though it was the same Rocky Linux distro (and it failed at some random docker compose networking config IIRC). I guess, Ansible scripts aren't reproducible and require constant work to keep them working. But I very much like them vs just SSH-ing into servers. That leads to my question. Is there anything I can do to write config once and just deploy it more or less reliably? NixOS looks interesting, but learning another programming language just for this feels a bit too much for me. Or maybe there's another way to do stuff like this which I overlook as I'm in a different industry?

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