Notes and Research, while I fiddle with the servers (2026-10-23)
The Big Idea
- Move from Debian to something on the main server.
- Noodling on what that something might be …
- Two main yet conflicting needs are
- It should be stable and boring and well known like Debian
- It should be amenable to being controlled with code
- One approach will be to just having an OS that is completely configurable.
NixOS beckons. But I think that is a project for a machine at home, not for something that I want to run on the wide net and in production. (this is just a matter of comfort and opinion. Not fact. Other folks routinely do run workloads on the net with NixOS) - The other approach is what I’m doing. Nothing matches what I’m looking for more than Talos. But I’m a bit hesitant, because at least now, Talos (despite the MPL) is Sidero Labs. Not community owned like Debian.
- After a bit of thought, well, if this is the risk to take, I’ll take it. And see how it goes. After all, I say I want something long term, but in the long term I figure out said something’s shortcomings (like I hate not being able to update Debian like an appliance) and then want to switch anyway.
- So, I already learned all about containers and how to create and write them last year. So this year, the big change, in addition to Talos is Cilium.
- The other thing I’m dropping is provisioning the Hetzner instance with OpenTofu/Terraform. A single node does not quite warrant that level of work.
Am pushing this to when I scale this up to AWS. - Think the VM should handle this. My current idle load seems to hover at a few % cpu and about 50% of my 8gb ram
Tentative Plan
- [ ] Create a Hetzner instance with Talos and Kubernetes on it
- [ ] Cilium
- [ ] Flux
- [ ] Traefik
- [ ] Letsencrypt
- [ ] Move workloads from the other cluster to this one. (Examine and drop the ones I don’t need)