Do you run an image-based Server?

Pantherina@feddit.de to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 15 points –

I use Fedora Kinoite daily and find it to be the only OS to make sense really.

I find Fedora CoreOS totally confusing (with that ignition file, no anaconda, no user password by default, like how would I set this up anywhere I dont have filesystem access to?)

But there are alternatives. I would like to build my own hardened Fedora server image that can be deployed anywhere (i.e. any PC to turn into a secure and easy out-of-the-box server).

As modern server often uses containers anyways, I think an atomic server only makes sense, as damn Debian is just a pain to use.

Experiences, recommendations?

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What makes Debian a pain to use on servers?

Automatic updates are overcomplex and not even preinstalled. Install a package, change some configs, so some more.

I dealt with it and its annoying.

And there is a lot more that is completely manual with no good default presets

cron
run as superuser script.sh
apt get updates
apt get upgrade -y
??? profit?

Why is there apt-get and apt? Also on regular updates there are sometimes package conflicts that need manual configuration. Maybe -y deals with some.

What monstrosity are you running and calling Debian that there are package conflicts on regular updates?

..or, are you talking early-2000's Linux, where SuSe was the only consistent distro and package management hadn't really been fully sorted out?

Probably I got none, just this "do you want to use the maintainers version" which is always a bit confusing. VirtualBox also gave issues but just dont use that crap.

unattended-upgrades is annoying? How so?

Its overcomplex. For sure I could get used to it and maybe this is the way to go.

But you could wrap this tedious process in a function.

Fedora has a distro upgrade command (that totally sucks but okay) since many years, while on Debian I needed to follow some random Guide to get on the hyped Debian 12.

Debian releases a migration guide with every new version release. And sorry but if you have trouble updating your system then replacing the source.list file and then updating your system again, you should reconsider running a server yourself, imho.

I was looking for such a guide but could not find it back then.

I followed this guide

Which may be overcomplex but it is complete and lots of things where not intuitive at all.

As I said, you could easily automate this step, instead of making it that manual. Or course I can do that, but why need to, if a sudo apt distro-upgrade would do it?

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade

Because those steps need manual review. Things change, packages get removed, packages get upgraded, config files need to get manual reviewed and merged etc.

On a simple System without much configuration that stuff does not matter, but when you use different package repositories and backports you need to be careful. I am not sure how introducing a new command does solve those complex issues. Imo only the system admin can decide what the best steps are.

If you're on Debian, it's the tried and true method. The config is dead simple for most upgrades, just un-comment the line in the config file next to the type of upgrades you want, stable or testing. It can take some debugging if you have a package with it's own APT repo. It'll just ignore those updates by default.