Personal infrastructure setup 2026
29 points by Foxboron
29 points by Foxboron
Very cool. I have been thinking about doing my own post as my home infrastructure story has changed significantly in the last couple of months.
I've been running 2 TrueNAS servers and using Ansible to deploy to them, but that got tiresome. I had used Terraform a lot for work so after a lot of work I created a provider for TrueNAS that can deploy custom "apps" using docker compose.
I've got caddy for public facing services, with their records managed by cloudflare. Private stuff is handled by tailscale. Backups are going to a Scaleway S3 glacier bucket. All this with Terraform. It honestly feels like magic, and I'm glad to not have to use Ansible anymore.
Was your main gripe with Ansible the authoring of tasks, the use of the environment including having the right keys and such established, or a TrueNAS specific problem?
I like the declarative nature of Terraform. I describe the state I want, and Terraform makes it happen.
With Ansible, it's more brute force. Go here, run this command etc. Perhaps I was using it wrong, but I have a lot more experience with Terraform.
Funny, because I bounced off of Ansible for almost the opposite reason: it abstracted over details that I wanted to micromanage. (Usually when something was breaking, and I was struggling to figure out why. I'm blaming Ansible for leaky abstractions here, but also it's possible I just wasn't skilled at using this particular tool.)
I think if you build a declarative system, you have to do a very, very good job of it. Glad you're having a good experience with Terraform.
Heh I suppose when I said "describe", I didn't mean in abstractions. I often like to drill down to the primitive level of hcl.
Yeah, I'm still using Proxmox for my infra, but I've switched to Incus for workstation use and it's stealing my heart. IncusOS' ZFS story is slightly worse than Proxmox, but other than that, I think when I iterate on my personal infra, Incus is going to win.
I'm not in love with application containers (Docker), but even I am forced to use some, because some software is only distributed as a first-class citizen there. I'm currently playing with quadlets and k8s to run that, but perhaps I should try Incus.
I am using Terraform at work, and I love the concept, but for the moment I'm relying on Puppet for host state management- because other than NixOS configuration, it's the best host state management solution I've found. I tie that up with an unholy Ansible abomination... which includes creating hosts using Ansible, which I should switch to Terraform...
I'm currently playing with quadlets
I originally used quadlets to host Immich, and the UX was miserable. I like the theory of using systemd for this, but the actual interface is just terrible for any debugging purposes.
So I moved all of it to Incus.
I'm trying to go to the website to buy the thing but it doesn't DNS resolve. I don't know if it's a States thing. I tried it on both my internal external resolvers. I'm referring to the KVM over IP
These are not sold, it's just the semantics and the components. There are other similar devices though.
I also do something interesting. I don't use bridge. I use macvlan which is very nice because it prevents things from the host from talking to itself. It's also very convenient because you don't have to do anything practically just enable it. Make sure you got the Mac VLAN modules loaded. I basically assign statics on my ISP and serve things that way. It's very handy. Also running docker with an lxc is very cool. I love the backup features, and the console. I can completely eliminate SSH access to the hosts themselves with the exception of the incus box. I haven't bothered with incUS OS although it looks nice, the system is so old it doesn't support TPM! That is the system I'm running it on.