A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Ansible doesn't need an agent besides python and can take care of most kinds of updates. You have to run/schedule it regularly though. It's pretty good for updating multiple hosts at once (assuming they mostly have the same OSes).
For uptime, CPU etc you mostly need agents but Proxmox also shows some of these in the UI.
Cheers I'll check out Ansible, it been on my lost of things to look at over the years anyway so its a good excuse to dig into it
AWX is basically Ansible as a service.
Wait. That sounds dumb. Hosted and centralized Ansible?
Idk. Brain not braining. Just saying, it's worth checking out.
True, but I'm not sure I'd put up awx nowadays. At work we migrated from Tower/AWX to Ansible in Gitlab pipelines because of constant problems and I'm thinking about doing a similar thing in my Forgejo. I'm not much of a fan if running Ansible via CLI except for development purposes. Too much trouble with variables
AWX is a pain to install and maintain. Development has also been cut for the most part since Redhat wants you to use Tower.
As others have said, if your VMs are Linux, set up unattended_updates and forget about it.
If your VMs are windows, then Action1 is free up to 200 clients, it does need an agent installed, but that auto updates too.
Yep, I do that on Debian hosts, EL (RHEL/Rocky/etc.) have a similar feature.
However, you need to keep an eye for updates that require a reboot. I use my own Nagios agent that (among other things) sends me warnings when hosts require a reboot (both apt/dnf make this easy to check).
I wouldn't care about last online/reboots; I just do some basic monitoring to get an alert if a host is down. Spontaneous reboots would be a sign of an underlying issue.
They were talking about something similar on episode 38 of https://hybridcloudshow.com/ I think. I see that it is not out yet, I got it early because I pay for the subscription. When it comes out you could give it a listen
I didn't catch everything, but Ansible might be worth looking into
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out
I've always felt like this is an area with a huge gap. I've got my own fragile, cobbled-together bullshit that works for me, but it's far from ideal or reliable if I'm being honest. I do love Ansible's general idea of relying on standard, always-ish available protocols like ssh as a universal connection method, and I think it could work well as the bulletproof lower layer when you want to use direct control over the CLI tools and configuration files, like what git provides for anything requiring version control, but ansible needs a slick management interface like github/forgejo provides on top of git, to fill in the higher level UI for when you need a wider scope to get an overview of what's going on or to make general configuration changes without needing to get your hands dirty. Ideally it would look a lot like Proxmox itself does, just, not specific to Proxmox. Like if I want to add my Steam Deck, and I've got ssh enabled on it and it's not asleep, it should be able to ansible its way in there somehow to at least get whatever basic details it can. Maybe that's only basic system information at first, but from there I could work on customizing it. That's what I would consider the ideal, for me at least.
Yea that was going to be my next step if I don't find anything that fits my needs, I'll make it - but this is a solved problem for sure. I just need the right thing that's close enough to what I'm looking for.
Very few things out there don't require an agent. TacticalRMM is a decent self-hosted device management platform, but I don't really trust them after some controversy with an embedded Monero miner in the agent (has since been removed, but come on).
MeshCentral is what TRMM uses for its remoting and its pretty robust, but doesn't do patch management on its own. If most of your infrastructure is Linux, you can easily handle it yourself though.
TBH, manual management would be the easiest if your infrastructure is small enough.
I run debian on everything, so I set up unattended-upgrades for security updates and basically forget about it. Docker updates are also automatic with Komodo, just make sure databases are pinned to a major version.
For monitoring my services I use Uptime Kuma, and get an alert if a service goes down so I can fix it.
Been pretty solid for years now. Things get rebooted every month or two when I do a Proxmox upgrade and reboot the host.
I use Ultimate Updater connected to gotify to tell me which machines have updates with a noti every day. I can then run update and it will take snapshots and upgrade everything when needed.
It really only does linux systems and wont do docker, but there's watchtower (the one that's still alive) to do that.
Had a look at that, sounds pretty cool. Curious to know why you linked to a fork that is out of date and not to the original at https://github.com/BassT23/Proxmox
TBH I just did a quick web search on my phone and picked the first one. Apologies.
No stress, just making sure there wasn't some other reason for it. Cheers
Ansible+Semaphore UI