I was skeptical about ChatGPT at first, and didn’t think I’d actually use it. Lately, however, I’ve found that ChatGPT is actually the perfect unpaid assistant in my homelab, helping me solve issues I never could before.
Google and Forums Have Always Been My Go-to for Researching Issues
While I’ve only been running my homelab for the past few years, I’ve been in the programming and Linux systems administration game for over a decade now.
The entire time that I’ve worked with Linux servers, I’ve simply gone to either Google, forums, or friends to figure out problems when they’d come up. This, largely, worked just fine for me—though it was quite time-consuming.
As I don’t have any formal training with Linux, and I’m entirely self-taught, there are things that would be simple to others that are foreign to me, requiring me to dig through forum post after forum post, crawl all overassistance sites like StackOverflow, all in hopes that I find the one command I was searching for.
Eventually, I’d find the right combination of search term and blog post and land on the information that I’d need. However, it would often take me quite some time to arrive there—sometimes requiring hours of research to solve a single problem.
This did work for me, as a lot of my Linux system admin work was just for fun, but it was still frustrating with how long things would take. I’d sit down to work on one of my websites and end up spending the entire day solving a single problem. No actual website work would get done.
Often, Answers Simply Didn’t Apply to My Specific Setup
A large part of what would take so long for me is that my specific setup was different from that of the forum poster’s setup.
I preferred NGINX and not Apache, meaning any posts that solved the problem I was having using Apache wouldn’t directly apply to me. Yes, the techniques can sometimes transfer, but without formal knowledge, that’s not always the case.
So, I’d keep looking until I found that diamond in the rough where someone else was running a similar-enough setup to me. It would take a while, but I’d eventually find them. If not, I’d end up on an IRC server somewhere waiting for someone with more intimate knowledge of my issue to respond and help out—if that help ever came.
ChatGPT Learns What My Setup Is and Gives Direct Advice
While I initially was skeptical ofChatGPT, I’ve grown to love it because of how helpful it can be in my homelab. I’m able to tell ChatGPT my specific setup, down to the operating system I’m running, network card I’m using, drivers that I do or don’t have installed, software I’m using, and more.
This has proved useful to me in so many scenarios. I’d say in 9 out of 10 scenarios, ChatGPT is able to help me fix whatever issue I run into in my homelab. From trying to figure out a database problem (I hate MySQL) to troubleshooting why a website is throwing HTTP 413 errors, I’m able to use ChatGPT to track down the problem and fix it.
The best part of using ChatGPT for this is I can ask it a question, take its advice, run the command(s), and then go back to ChatGPT with what happened to continue troubleshooting. It’s as if I’m talking to a Linux system admin in real-time.
In fact, I’ve used ChatGPT to do more than help me troubleshoot Linux issues. I’ve used it to help me reverse-engineer something in CSS that I saw on a website I liked. I’ve used ChatGPT to help me rebuild Docker containers that had missing dependencies. I’ve even used it to find new ideas on what to host in my homelab, as it scoured the internet to help me find a tool specific to something that I wanted to do.
ChatGPT Doesn’t Hold All the Answers
A few weeks ago, I was trying to fix a game server that I host for a friend. The server randomly stopped working, and I couldn’t figure out what happened. Like I always do now, I started with ChatGPT. I spent probably an hour or two troubleshooting my issue, only to find that ChatGPT’s knowledge base wasn’t up-to-date enough to know the game developer broke Linux compatibility a few days prior.
It wasn’t ChatGPT’s fault. I only found out about the breakage through a single obscure Reddit post that linked to a SteamDB code change. However, I came to that conclusion by giving ChatGPT the console output of the game server as it tried to boot. ChatGPT helped me narrow down the problem to a missing set of libraries, and then I was able to take that information and go to Google.
You see, I wouldn’t have known where to start if I was just trying to go to Google with the console output. There were so many errors that it was overwhelming. ChatGPT, on the other hand, took the output, boiled it down to a few key problems, and helped me figure out what to try and tackle first.
Once I had a few things fixed up, ChatGPT surfaced the missing libraries and, after trying a few things, I took to Google and found that the developer removed Linux support. ChatGPT and Google work hand-in-hand in my use-case. Neither one is a silver bullet, but both are tools in my tool belt.
As With All Online Homelab Advice, I Run the Commands at My Own Risk
Now, I do want to warn you before you just dive into ChatGPT and run every single command it outputs. ChatGPT doesn’t know everything, and it’svery possiblethat ChatGPT could give you a bad command to run.
I’ve had this happen to me, but over the years, I’ve learned the Linux command line quite extensively. This allows me to know, at least on a basic premise, what commands I’m running.
If ChatGPT tells me to runps aux | grep defunct, I know what the ps command does (it’ll search for an active process). Likewise,kill -s SIGCHLDtells me that I’m going to be killing a process with a specific ID.
Now, I don’t know every single Linux command, as there are quite a lot. So, if ChatGPT tells me to run something that I’ve never used before, I’ll likely look it up to see what it’ll do before running it. The last thing I need is for it to give me a command that doesrm -rf /(whichdeletes everything on your system), but look like something else.
So, before you go running any commands that ChatGPT gives you, be sure you know what it should do. All advice from ChatGPT on your server should be taken with a grain of salt and all commands should be run at your own risk.
ChatGPT really is a powerful piece of software. If you want to learn how to use it best, I definitely recommend learninghow ChatGPT worksin the first place. Knowing how it works will help you to also knowsome of its limitations.
At the end of the day,ChatGPT is a great tool for learning how to use Linux. It can scour the entirety of the internet in a few seconds, surfacing forum posts that you might never have seen. Plus, in surfacing those forum posts, it can tailor the information to your skill level or specific application.
