this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?

I think I just have too much going in my "lab" the point that when something breaks (and my wife and/or kids complain) it's more of a hassle to try and remember how to fix or troubleshoot stuff. I lightly document myself cuz I feel like I can remember well enough. But then it's a style to find the time to fix, or stuff is tested and 80%completed but never fully used because life is busy and I don't have loads of free time to pour into this stuff anymore. I hate giving all that data to big tech, but I also hate trying to manage 15 different containers or VMs, or other services. Some stuff is fine/easy or requires little effort, but others just don't seem worth it.

I miss GUIs with stuff where I could fumble through settings to fix it as is easier for me to look through all that vs read a bunch of commands.

Idk, do you get lab burnout? Maybe cuz I do IT for work too it just feels like it's never ending...

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[–] Dylancyclone@programming.dev 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

No that's totally fair! I'm a huge fan of making things reproducible since I've ran into too many situations where things need to be rebuilt, and always open to ways to improve it. At home I use ansible to configure everything, and at work we use ansible and declare our entire Jenkins instance as (real) code. I don't really have the time for (and I'm low-key scared of the rabbit hole that is) Nix, and to me my homelab is something that is configured (idempotently) rather than something I wanted to handle with scripts.

I even wrote some pytest-like scripts to test the playbooks to give more productive errors than their example errors, since I too know that pain well :D

That said, I've never heard of PyInfra, and am definitely interested in learning more and checking out that talk. ~~Do you know if the talk will be recorded? I'm not sure I can watch it live.~~ Edit: Found a page of all the recordings of that room from last year's event https://video.fosdem.org/2025/ua2220/ So I'm guessing it will be available. Thank you for sharing this! :D

I love the "Warning: This talk may cause uncontrollable urges to refactor all your Ansible playbooks" lol I'm ready