Automating system admin

Found myself in a google rabbit hole trying to understand why network had lost DNS functionality and revisited my USG and pihole setup., in doing so I came across this article. One of my worries is what if my NAS, that provides pihole or a pi that dose other important duties, fails. How long would it take me to set it all up again.

I am sure this is overkill for most, but the use of Ansible with Docker looks like a really good solution. I am tempted to offload my docker containers for pihole and mqqt to a pi and setup this way so I have an easy way to setup in future and make a quick way to be up and running on failure, rather than having to remember which random webpage told me how to install mosquito on my QNAP.

https://ben.balter.com/2021/09/01/how-i-re-over-engineered-my-home-network/

Thought others might be interested.

Caddy looks to be an interesting option for certificate renewals that is hopefully simpler than LetsEncrypt

An -- at least tangentially related -- response. Presently, I have three rPi's running on my LAN.

rPi 1 (very old): Running an NTP server. (Totally unnecessary exercise).
rPi 2: Running an SMB server with attached NAS storage.
rPi 3: Running PiHole and a recently-installed Apache server.

For rPi's 1 and 2, I have a readme.txt file which explains the steps needed to configure each from scratch. For rPi 3, it's not really necessary since the whole thing could be recreated in no time flat. To be honest, all this could probably be done with one Pi (with room to spare). All this works well and my only complaint is that it's a minor headache to apply updates to everything. I have to ssh into each to apply updates (including PiHole updates) which I must admit takes less effort than to remember to actually do it in the first place.

Dave,
Have you considered setting up a Chron job to run an update at some interval? I've got several Pi's around the house for various things including Pi-Hole, Hoobs, SDR decoding, CHIRP to program my radios. I have most of them set with a chron job weekly at an odd time during the early morning. The command I run is:

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sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade && sudo reboot

A Cron job is a great idea and I hadn't even considered it. At least theoretically, you could also do one for

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pihole -up

Maybe you already do.

Thanks for the tip!

Yes, I include that command in my chron job. Not sure I need both, but I also periodically run a speed test on the same rPi that gets saved to a file so I like to keep the whole thing up to date