How do you keep up?

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Unraid + Unifi network equipment. Everything is scheduled and automatic, with the exception of large Unraid updates, but those are only every ~6 months. Every night mover from cache SSD - > HDD array, then checks for plugin updates, then docker container updates, if Monday morning SSD trim, and if 1st of the month does an array parity check/repair.

After all that if it's Monday morning, Unifi will check for firmware then software updates.

Sometimes a docker container will get a breaking update maybe once a year, and then I just go look @ documentation and see what needs to be changed to the config to fix.

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Use Debian LTS or Ubuntu LTS (10 years support with free Ubuntu Pro). Turn on automatic unattended updates. Upgrade OS when you're bored one of those years.

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I have rss feeds for my main service updates so I know what new features I have, the services mostly run in podman containers and update automatically each Monday. I also have daily backups (timed to run just before the update on monday) in case anything does break.

If it breaks I fix it depending on how much I want/need it, mostly it's a matter of half an hour to fix it and with my current NixOS/Podman system I haven't yet needed to fix anything this year so it breaks infrequently.

Also why are you using Kubernetes on a single host if you want minimal maintenance? XD

My recommendation is to switch to just managing containers, you should just be able to export the volumes out of kubernetes and import them as normal volumes, as long as they're mounted in the right place you keep your data and if it doesn't work just try again. Not like you need to destroy the current system to slowly replace it.

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If it works, I don't update unless I'm bored or something. I also spread things out on multiple machines, so there's less chance of stuff happening like you describe with the charts feature going away. My NAS is pretty much just a NAS now.

You can probably backup your configs/data, upgrade, then deploy jellyfin again, restore, and reconfigure. You should probably backup your data on your ZFS pool. But, I recently updated to the latest TrueNas Scale from ~5 year old FreeBSD version of TrueNas and the pools still worked fine (none of the "apps" or jails worked, obviously). The upgrade process even ported my service configurations over. I didn't care about much of the data in the pools, so only backed up the most important stuff.

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In the business world it's pretty common to do staged or switchover upgrades: test new version in a lab environment, iron out the install/config details. Then upgrade a single production server and do a test with a small group of users. Or, build new servers with the new stuff, have a set of users run on it for a while, in this way you can always just move those users back to a known good server.

How do you do this at home? VMs for lots of stuff, or duplicate hardware for NAS type stuff (I've read of running TrueNAS in a VM).

To borrow from the preparedness community: if you have 1 you have none, if you have 2 you have 1. As an example, the business world often runs mission-critical systems in a redundant setup in regionally-different data centers, so a storm won't take them down. The question is how to reproduce this idea in a home lab environment.

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Ansible.

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I've got backups. Haven't updated or looked at my server in months. If I'm ever compromised by missing security updates, I just load a backup and regenerate all keys.

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You might want to think about running a “stable” or “LTS” OS and spin up things in Docker instead. That way you only have to do OS level updates very rarely.

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I learned this the hard way as well... I did a big OS update on mine once and it broke almost every application running on it. Docker worked perfectly still. I transferred everything I could to Docker after that.

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This is not practical for a home setup. Not because it would be expensive for more hardware or whatever, but because as soon as you have multiple systems doing the same thing, their state diverges and for pretty much anything that is popular for selfhosting you cannot merge them again or mirgrate users between them without loosing anything. Distributed databases alone are a huge pita, and maintaining such redundant setups would be a million times more effort than just making sure that you can easily and quickly atomically roll back failed updates

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As I said "how to reproduce this in a home setup".

I'm running multiple machines, paid little for all of them, and they all run at pretty low power. I replicate stuff on a schedule, I and have a cloud backup I verify quarterly.

If OP is thinking about how to ensure uptime (however they define it) and prevent downtime due to upgrades, then looking at how Enterprise does things (the people who use research into this very subject performed by universities and organizations like Microsoft and Google), would be useful.

Nowhere did I tell OP to do things this way, and I'd thank you to not make strawmen of my words.

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I don't update unless I'm bored

Hahahaha, one of my kind!

My upgrades usually occur because I'm setting up a new system anyway, that way my effort is building for tomorrow in addition to the upgrades, and I get testing time to ensure changeover is pretty smooth.

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Wow, neat approach.

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Just subscribe to the release channel. That varies from OS to OS or Software, but is worth it.

Use tools that are universal. For example, I have not used TrueNAS Scale because they did not support native docker at the time. OS specific solutions are more likely to break then universal once (truecharts vs docker)

To get up and running again after a complete failure i can just download the latest config and data from my backup and set up any distro that supports docker and my system is running again.

I do OS upgrades when they are available, usually within 1 or 2 days and containers are updated with watchtower daily.

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I use NixOS so if an update breaks, I just roll back. And since it's effectively a rolling release distribution there isn't any risk of being left behind on an outdated version.

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Constant maintenance? What's that?

Here's my setup:

OS - openSUSE Leap - I upgrade when I remember
software - Docker images in a docker compose file; upgrading is a simple docker command, and I'll only do it if I need something in the update
hardware - old desktop; I'll upgrade when I have extra hardware

I honestly don't think about it. I run updates when I get to it (every month or so), and I'll do an OS upgrade a little while after a new release is available (every couple years?).

I don't even know what TrueCharts is. Maybe that's your issue?

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Same, but openSUSE. Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop, Leap on my servers.

And yeah, if I need to babysit something, I'll use an alternative. I'll upgrade when I'm ready to, which is usually over holidays when I'm bored and looking for a project.

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How does that help here?

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For automating maintenance and updates? How exactly does it not?

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They are complaining because of the number of updates and breaking changes. Ansible just a tool for bulk changes

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How do you keep up?