Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?
I think I just have too much going in my “lab” the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it’s more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it’s a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don’t have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don’t seem worth it.
I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.
Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it’s never ending…
No that’s totally fair! I’m a huge fan of making things reproducible since I’ve ran into too many situations where things need to be rebuilt, and always open to ways to improve it. At home I use ansible to configure everything, and at work we use ansible and declare our entire Jenkins instance as (real) code. I don’t really have the time for (and I’m low-key scared of the rabbit hole that is) Nix, and to me my homelab is something that is configured (idempotently) rather than something I wanted to handle with scripts.
I even wrote some
pytest-like scripts to test the playbooks to give more productive errors than their example errors, since I too know that pain well :DThat said, I’ve never heard of PyInfra, and am definitely interested in learning more and checking out that talk.
Do you know if the talk will be recorded? I’m not sure I can watch it live.Edit: Found a page of all the recordings of that room from last year’s event https://video.fosdem.org/2025/ua2220/ So I’m guessing it will be available. Thank you for sharing this! :DI love the “Warning: This talk may cause uncontrollable urges to refactor all your Ansible playbooks” lol I’m ready