James Valleroy: How I avoid sysadmin work
The server running this blog is a RockPro64 sitting in my living room. Besides WordPress (the blogging software), I run various other services on it:
- Bepasty for sharing files,
- Ikiwiki for taking notes,
- Quassel for staying connected to IRC chat servers,
- Radicale for synchronizing my calendar and tasks,
- Shaarli for sharing bookmarks, and
- Tiny Tiny RSS for reading other people s blogs.
- It is not part of my educational or professional background (which mainly consists of embedded software engineering).
- I think that I lack the kind of discipline needed to be a sysadmin. For example, taking notes of the commands that you are running, or testing things before you do them on a production server. I m likely to just run commands, and lose track of my notes.
- And finally a type of laziness. I just don t want to spend a lot of time and effort setting up or maintaining some services.
- I do have a server running in my home, but I don t consider myself a sysadmin.
- I have a different kind of discipline than the one I described above.
- I m willing to spend time and effort to improve things, but I want to do it in a different way than usual.
- In the various Debian packages of the services I have installed.
- In FreedomBox configuration and integration of those packages.
- Or even directly to the upstream software development.
- The software I am running is very standardized, specifically to what is available in Debian and FreedomBox. This limits the number of services available: for example, I could not easily run a Mastodon server with this approach. Also, I am not maintaining any custom configurations for my own services.
- I am presenting these ideas as they occur to me, and specific to my situation. But there are similar concepts out there, for example Infrastructure as Code .
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