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by bjoli 2430 days ago
I'm building a home server in a week or two to replace all my single board computers. Instead of running one system I want to do it in VMs to help me keep them separates and easily backupable.

I have very little experience with that, and I just want to ask whether fedora silverblue would be the distro for me? Does anyone have any experience?
3 comments
Seirdy 2430 days ago
Consider using toolbox[0][1], a tool built by and for Fedora (especially Fedora Silverblue and CoreOS).

Essentially, you enter an unprivileged container (no root, no daemon), but keep your username and home directory. What this means is you can switch operating systems but keep your environment and kernel.

I enter toolbox to build packages using build-time dependencies from Fedora Rawhide. Outside toolbox, my packages get updated as well.

As of 2019-10-30, only Fedora-based images have been officially created; however, others have made functioning PRs for Ubuntu and CentOS-based toolboxes.

Your containers can be saved to a special location that gets backed up. I back up mine with rclone[2] to my school's unlimited Google Drive storage.

[0]: https://github.com/containers/toolbox

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...

[2]: https://rclone.org/

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bjoli 2428 days ago
I think I will go with fedora server, since this will double as my desktop system from time to time, and for that I use a lot of Guix stuff. Using Guix on silverblue seems like asking for trouble...
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Seirdy 2424 days ago
You can use Guix inside toolbox!
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bradstewart 2430 days ago
I use Fedora Server for exactly that. It comes with Cockpit [0] out of the box, which I find to be a great management interface.

[0] https://cockpit-project.org/

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copperx 2430 days ago
I've never heard of Cockpit before. It is a lightweight, secure CPanel alternative?
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space_ghost 2430 days ago
I just installed it to check it out. Nowhere near as "feature complete" as CPanel, but it looks like a good lightweight status monitoring dashboard. Allows some minimal configuration changes and provides a decent HTML5 console implementation.
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bradstewart 2430 days ago
It's closer to CPanel's WebHost Manager product (aimed at hosting providers/machine admins) than the customer-facing CPanel.

You login with your usual Linux user account and can do things like network and storage configuration, get CPU usage statistics, start/stop containers and VMs, that sort of stuff. Nothing you couldn't do via SSH, but presented in a straightforward UI.

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jlgaddis 2430 days ago
I've used just about all of the "hypervisors" at one point or another. If this is all new to you, I'd suggest perhaps starting with Proxmox VE [0]. That'll give you a decent (web) GUI to use to manage everything. Once you understand how things work and have some familiarity with the concepts, then you can start looking at other hypervisors if you decide you want something different.

[0]: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve

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