I usually connect with my server via ssh in a terminal and run basic commands. What’s a better, more efficient and modern way of doing that? Especially considering ai and documentation along the way? I wonder if there’s a better approach than “connect from remote and act local”. Is there a method to “code local and push to remote”?
I use a fedora server with podman, caddyfile and vi.
You must log in or register to comment.
I wait for something to break. Then I yell “God fucking dammit, I don’t have time for this right now!” and spend an hour triaging things before I just try docker down, pull, up and everything works.
same. or i just df and see / 100%
Early on I wrote a script for my user account to run df and save the output to a file, then a second script to read that file and if the drive was full send me an email.
First, it failed because it couldn’t send the email because the email service failed under full disk conditions.
Second, it failed because it couldn’t write the file to disk because the disk was full.
Third, it failed because outbound SMTP was blocked by my ISP.
I learned a lot about how well you can fail if you really put your mind to it. Now I have Home Assistant grabbing the disk stats for my machines and flagging anything over 90%.
This is oddly inspirational
Poorly.
Hear hear
Hell yeah
I just use ssh and manually type commands. Keep doing it and you will get good and it will become second nature.
No need to burn tokens on basic tasks.
Master your tools. Learn awk, sed, just, etc.
Some shell customisation can help. For example I’m fond of zsh-auto-suggestions and skim. Makes me quicker.
Ansible is one way to “code local, push to remote(s)”. Can define so-called playbooks, which is basically just a script, to do reoccuring tasks like e.g. updates.
Ansible is great, I just wish it would automatically cleanup stuff on the server when I remove parts of the config. I know it’s not the goal, but I dream about a tool that works this way. I get many leftover stuff over years
That sounds like NixOS to me.
I have yet to try it but apparently
We fixed that with roles that manage both install and uninstall
That works but that’s only useful if you have many machines. I have a single server so it’s the same burden as doing it manually. If only the uninstall step could be completely automated by just reverting the install step
Not quite, if you write the role to manage the life cycle of a bit of software then uninstall is part of that life cycle.
But I do see that investment in time looks more then just do it by hand
“code local and push remote” is only more efficient if you have a faulty connection with ssh or want to use a GUI editor that doesn’t support remote connections. What you’re doing is good. You can scoure for more “modern” ways that might have more glimmer and sparkly lights, but it won’t improve efficiency.
Declarative configuration (like docker compose) is basically “code local, push remote”, and it has a lot of benefits, including improving efficiency because you have a clearer idea of exactly what is set up on the server, to make it easier to debug or make changes.
Contrast this with just sshing in and running a bunch of commands to install something. Then coming back months later and wondering “what files did I touch? what packagea did I install? Hmm dpkg log says I added X but then later I removed it, so was it important?” Etc.
I write my NixOS configs in my PC, commit to the repo, then push it to the server. Then SSH in, and apply it. Or more likely, MOSH in.
A mix of prayer and bash scripts.
Remove bash scripts and add poorly configured logging and that’s me!
At least you have logging!
Ansible.
That, and there is no change that isn’t done on ansible, or, when it required trying and research gets backported into a bit of ansible.
It’s good to get comfortable in the command line, including over ssh.
Especially considering ai and documentation along the way?
If I am going to ask AI or Google about something, I just do that to help me find the answer and then apply the answer myself. That way I learn, and can double check the AI isn’t hallucinating, at least on in obvious ways.
As for documentation, I keep a notes folder with detailed notes on manual configuration I’ve done, how and why, and the things I’ve learned along the way. I’ve found it’s both useful to help remember the things I’ve learned, and it is useful to go back to refer to.
I use ssh with tmux
This is the way
<insert Mandalorian gif here>
I ssh into it twice a year to perform updates but otherwise i leave it alone. Server’s been chugging along for like a decade now.
Similar, but you might want to update more frequently with the huge number of critical security bugs being discovered by AI recently
I have unattended upgrades configured
Hmm I need to figure out how to do that
If you are using aptitude (apt) it is quite simple: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/how-to/software/automatic-updates/
If you just want security updates and are fine with the default configs:
# apt install unattended-upgrades
Twice a year is crazy. I suppose most of my maintainence is adding drives (I’m a creator and I definitely totally need to archive all of my footage), but I also run a fair few apps that have needed manual update steps, so I do all my updates manually so I can fix stuff if it breaks.
I spent a while getting Ansible to be able to setup and maintain my server(s). And ended up not using it as much as I should, mostly because the computer I used to run Ansible from became a “Steam Machine” so I’m rarely sitting on it with a keyboard now and I don’t want to have personal info and keys on my work computer.
But it was a good learning, and useful while I used it. Now I just use ssh and compose files directly.
You upgraded from ansible to ssh. As someone forced to write yaml for ansible professionally and has used many other config management tools, I can only commend your success at escaping ansible.
Try mgmtconfig.
Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.
Depends what you’re trying to do, really
If you’re talking about going in and restarting containers and checking logs, there are tools like Portainer that give a nice UI you can quickly use from your phone
If you’re talking about repetitive tasks, sometimes there’s a tool to automate it already (e.g. updates via watchtower, unattended-upgrades), and if not, you can write a script and possibly run it via a cronjob if that makes sense
If you’re talking about doing new stuff, you either stick with the SSH & shell commands, or you look into IaC tools like ansible as another reply mentioned. Another option is something like Nix where the setup is defined in config, so you make your changes there
If you’re connecting from a system that’s a long distance away from your server in terms of latency, mosh can be more comfortable to use than ssh.
Mosh is pretty good!
