For me it is writting docker compose files describing my services. I like to test them on my machine before pushing them to the server(s). But I guess that’s my own fault for not using something like portainer or even SSHFS.
What’s the most annoying / painful step for you?
Probably almost getting hit in the head by a steel rack post or installing an APC2200 by myself. Then maybe all the small cuts and bruises from my broken eBay rack rails…
Oh you didn’t mean physical?
Jokes aside, my TrueNAS is a perpetual worry machine for me. All the drives are second-hand and the pool is encrypted. I have off-site backups but I know someday I’ll lose the encryption key, three drives will go bad at the same time, some update will make the machine unbootable etc.
I’m also security paranoid and quite often cut my nose to spite my own face because of it; trust me, you don’t need management VLANs and LACP for absolutely everything. You’ll just end up locking yourself out of an otherwise perfectly functional system.