i guess you were able to install the os ok? are you using proxmox or regular servers?

I was. It was learning the Nix way of doing things that was just taking more time than i had anticipated. I’ll get around to it eventually though

I tried out proxmox years ago but besides the web interface, I didn’t understand why I should use it over Debian or Ubuntu. At the moment, I’m just using Ubuntu and docker containers. In previous setups, I was using KVMs too.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you have to reboot every time you change your Nix config? That was what was painful. Once it’s set up the way you want, it seemed great but getting to that point for a beginner was what put me off.

I would be interested to see the config though

Grayjay by FUTO has been working well for me

A few reasons

1. My partner has plenty of hobbies but sys-admin isn’t one of them. I know I’ll show them how to turn off wireguard to troubleshoot why “the internet isn’t working” but eventually they would forget. Shit happens, sometimes servers go down and sometimes turning off wireguard would allow the internet to work lol
2. I’m a worrier. If there was an emergency, my partner needed to access the internet but couldn’t because my DNS server went down, my wireguard server went down, my ISP shit the bed, our home power went out, etc., and they forgot about the VPN, I’d feel terrible.
3. I was a little too ambitious when I first got into self hosting. I set up services and shared them before I was ready and ended up resetting them constantly for various reasons. For example, my Plex server is on it’s 12th iteration. My partner is understandably weary to try stuff I’ve set up. I’m at a point where I don’t introduce them to a service I set up unless accessing it is no different than using an app (like the Homeassistant app) or visiting a website. That intermediary step of ensuring the VPN is on and functional before accessing the service is more than I’d prefer to ask of them

Telling my partner to visit a website seems easy, they visit websites every day, but they don’t use a VPN everyday and they don’t care to.

I know I should learn NixOS, I even tried for a few hours one evening but god damn, the barrier to entry is just a little too high for me at the moment 🫤

I’ve played around with reverse proxies and ssl certs and the easiest method I’ve found so far was docker. Just haven’t put anything in production yet. If you don’t know how to use docker, learn, it’s so worth it.

Here is the tutorial I used and the note I left for myself. You’ll need a domain to play around with. Once you figure out how to get NGINX and certbot set up, replacing the helloworld container with a different one is relatively straight forward.

DO NOT FORGET, you must give certbot read write permissions in the docker-compose.yml file which isn't shown in this tutorial
-----EXAMPLE, NOT PRODUCTION CODE----

    nginx:
        container_name: nginx
        restart: unless-stopped
        image: nginx
        depends_on:
            - helloworld
        ports:
            - 80:80
            - 443:443
        volumes:
            - ./nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
            - ./certbot/conf:/etc/letsencrypt:ro
            - ./certbot/www:/var/www/certbot:ro

    certbot:
      image: certbot/certbot
      container_name: certbot
      volumes: 
        - ./certbot/conf:/etc/letsencrypt:rw
        - ./certbot/www:/var/www/certbot:rw
      command: certonly --webroot -w /var/www/certbot --keep-until-expiring --email *email* -d *domain1* -d *domain2* --agree-tos