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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/sunshine-and-sorrow on 2024-11-16 19:31:48+00:00.

I have a MiniPC at home on which I run docker containers for the applications I need. Each application has backups, so all good here. I’m behind my ISP’s CGNAT, so I have a VPS on which I run nginx and have it forward everything back to my home server via Wireguard. I have backups of my nginx config, so this is also fine.

So this is how things were for a while. Then I started adding more applications like Asterisk on-premise, which meant I had to do port forwarding from the VPS to my home address. I started maintaining a backup of my firewalld zones as well. Then I added ZNC as an IRC bouncer on the VPS itself. Over time I forgot what all I did on the VPS. There’s firewall rules, there’s modified systemd services (eg. I modify a service to run after another service has started), and I no longer have a track of everything due to my bad habit of doing everything directly on the server itself.

At the specific moment, I found it very convenient to just ssh in and do what I need without a second thought about whether I can replicate this again on a new server. In the event of a disaster, I can get everything set up from memory but it’s gonna take a lot of time as I debug everything. Now I’m thinking I should’ve done everything as Ansible playbooks so everything is repeatable, but I can’t help it because I just go in via ssh and do what I need.

How do you people deal with this? I feel like this is a workflow issue.