Finding a good bare-metal/IoT management solution for a hobbyist and clearing up my mental model.

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/sysadmin

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  • postgres

    Docker Official Image packaging for Postgres (by docker-library)

  • To monitor my server, I've used OSSEC, which, while useful, feels pretty unsupported, hard to use and actually limited beyond single-server use. Once I wanted to provision a second server, I learned the pain of having to re-configure a system from scratch, so I started using Ansible, but I find playbooks too "static", if that makes sense. I don't like that I have to manually add an IP of every new device, especially if I have to change it soon. Also, I can see how provisioning a lot of slightly different systems can get complex very fast. I feel like an abstraction over the playbooks is needed to utilize them efficiently, a sort of a layered model like docker has. I also learned that keeping stuff up to date, secure, while keeping everything from falling apart, is a nightmare. I understand that containers are made to solve this among other things, but you still have to manage the underlying host and not to mention that updating dockerized apps is no walk in the park either. One more thing that I find hard to solve is the dynamic nature of my cluster. Since I'm running everything on expendable, "civilian" hardware, stuff breaks, it gets replaced, the IPs change, so it would be really nice if I wouldn't have to rely on one master node being constantly available. While I know how much more complex a distributed system is compared to a non-distributed one, I feel like someone must have implemented what I need, and indeed they have, but it seems like every solution covers one specific thing very well but doesn't come close to fulfilling all my needs.

  • checkmk

    Checkmk - Best-in-class infrastructure & application monitoring

  • So far I've come across checkmk, which seems like an amazing tool for monitoring, but as far as I'm aware, it's only for that. You can't actually affect your systems with it. Then I tried openBalena, which seems really interesting, as it allows for pre-baking images, and deploying your apps inside of containers, but for monitoring it needs another solution to complement it, and I don't see how you can actually manage your cluster, aside from deploying apps to it. Upswift seems to do everything I need, but it looks like it's closed source and pretty expensive. Mender would be a really cool solution for updating in a safe way, but I think it lacks everything else. I know about the OpenStack ecosystem, and that might be what I need, but it's huge and I don't know where to look first.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • MeshCentral

    A complete web-based remote monitoring and management web site. Once setup you can install agents and perform remote desktop session to devices on the local network or over the Internet.

  • meshcentral does most of what you want, I manage about 200 linux clients in there. Won't automatically maintain stuff, but you can see status, batch run scripts, that kind of thing.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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