My home lab has a mild amount of complexity and I’d like practice some good habits about documenting it. Stuff like, what each system does, the OS, any notable software installed and, most importantly, any documentation around configuration or troubleshooting.
i.e. I have an internal SMTP relay that uses a letsencrypt SSL cert that I need to use the DNS challenge to renew. I’ve got the steps around that sitting in a Google Doc. I’ve got a couple more google docs like that.
I don’t want to get super complicated but I’d like something a bit more structured than a folder full of google docs. I’d also like to pull it in-house.
Thanks
Edit: I appreciate all the feedback I’ve gotten on this post so far. There have been a lot of tools suggested and some great discussion about methods. This will probably be my weekend now.
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Why not push it up to GitHub? Then you also get a commit history to see your changes overtime.
Wow that sounds convinient, where can i find a guide describing this? Has zero experience with git 😅
Gotcha. Git is useful in so many way, but it can be confusing to learn. I don’t have a guide on hand but searching for ‘getting started with git’ will get you pretty far.
Another great way to do this that I just thought of this second is using Notion. It is in markdown.
There are tons of tutorials around, but the basic gist is that you only use a couple of commands (or even a good frontend) in git, especially when it’s a one (wo)man show.
I highly recommend it!
Almost nothing haha. Some half-ass notes saved here and there, in a disorganized manner.
My stuff works, but I don’t recommend my approach.
This is what I’m trying to get away from.
Same, my stuff continuing to work relies on thoughts and prayers.
I use raneto, it is a small lightweight nodejs wiki. The files are stored as markdown.
That sounds useful.
Mine is, er, self-documenting, and my partner has instructions, in the event that I die, to plug the wifi router into the modem and unplug all the other crap. The router has a sticker saying ROUTER and the modem has a sticker saying MODEM.
Self documenting, eh? I may be familiar with the same process.
You just follow all the wires and read all the config files. Easy!
Exactly. It’s documented in the config files!
As I move to more self hosting, it’s becoming more and more important to create a “what to do if I die” procedure for my wife (or even children) to follow. I mean it’s not big deal if the plex server goes down and doesn’t come back up, I’m thinking more along the lines of all of our photos, important documents, password manager, those type of things. I have 3 - 2 - 1 backups for the important stuff and have tested them, but that means nothing to my wife if I wasn’t around to get that stuff back if something happened… I wonder some days if I should document it all and put a print out with a step by step guide on how to get everything back that a semi tech savvy person could follow.
Yes, I really need to do this too. It’s a fairly daunting task because my significant other is not at all comfortable with even slightly complicated operations on a computer. I need to figure out a way to make a really easily accessible backup of everything.
I run a local MediaWiki appliance from turnkeylinux, super easy to spin up in proxmox.
I use logseq to record any manual steps as well as any administrative actions that I take on a service. That being said, all of my homelan infrastructure is codified and stored in git in various ways so, it can be recreated as needed. There are very few manual steps in reconfiguring any of my services.
What is it that you all are documenting? I’m just getting started and have so far just set up docker and several containers (Plex, the *arrs, qbittorrent, gluetun) and not sure if I should be writing something down?
I’d like to document what I have, and what I need to do it spin it back up with minimal effort should I need to. Esp, anything that’s unique to my setup or that I did to work around a problem. I’ve shot myself in the foot many a time where I go back to something 6 months later and I’ve long since forgotten what I did. So, if it’s not commented in a config I’m figuring it out all over again.
I document my proxmox configuration, and again for each service running on it; ports, fqdn, let’s encrypt etc. Any problems or deviations from the standard installation and how I resolved it. How I mounted my media drive and and made it accessible in Plex and Jellyfin. Any configuration that I had to search for the solution, including the actual steps and not just links that might be gone in the future. The more services you accumulate the harder it is to start the documentation, so it’s a good idea to start sooner than later.
Joplin synced to webdav/nexcloud.
Same
ansible, self-documenting. My
playbook.ymlhas a list of roles attached to each host, each host’shost_varsfile has details on service configuration (domains, etc). It looks like this: https://pastebin.com/6b2Lb0MgAdditionally this role generates a markdown summary of the whole setup and inserts it into my infra’s
README.md.Manually generated diagrams, odd manual maintenance procedures and other semi-related stuff get their own sections in the README (you can check the template here) or linked markdown files. Ongoing problems/research goes into the infra gitea project’s issues.
I’m only just starting to dip my toes in docker. Most of my stuff are kvm vms. I have a decent set of Ansible roles to setup a new vm when I spin it up but I’m not to the point where the specifics of every system is in Ansible yet.
You can full well deploy docker stacks using ansible. This is what I used to do for rocket.chat: [1] [2] (ditched it for Matrix/element without Docker, but the concept stays valid)
I’m not to the point where the specifics of every system is in Ansible yet.
What I suggest is writing a playbook that list the roles attached to your servers, even if the roles actually do nothing:
# playbook.yml - hosts: myhomeserver.example.org roles: - debian-base - docker - application-x - service-y - hosts: mydevserver.example.org - debian-base - application-z# roles/application-x/tasks/main.yml - name: setup application-x debug: msg: "TODO This will one day deploy application-x. For now the setup is entirely manual and documented in roles/application-x/README.md"# roles/application-x/tasks/main.yml - name: setup service-y debug: msg: "TODO This will one day deploy service-y. For now the setup is entirely manual and documented in roles/service-y/README.md" #...This is a good start for a config management/automated deployment system. At least you will have an inventory of hosts and what’s running on them. Work your way from there, over time progressively convert your manual install/configuration steps to automated procedures. There are a few steps that even I didn’t automate (like configuring LDAP authentication for Nextcloud), but they are documented in the relevant role README [3]
That makes a lot of sense.
I was going to recommend Ansible as well - documentation as code can never be out of date if you continue using it.
I’m not very good at deciding on where to document things, so I have a mix of BookStack, Dokuwiki, and Obsidian currently.
I really like Dokuwiki but I like the UI/UX of BookStack better so I’m working on a plugin to sync bookstack and obsidian. I’ll probably get rid of Dokuwiki after that.
The main reason for syncing with obsidian is that I want documentation that isn’t stored on the thing it’s about, in case my servers completely die.
In another thread, someone reminded me that TiddlyWiki still exists, it’s also a pretty cool little tool.
For me, making a graph is the best documentation, everything else is in config files.
If I really do need to takes notes, It’s currently in notion but I’m hoping soon I’ll be able to self-host AnyType (https://github.com/orgs/anyproto/discussions/17)
That is quite the diagram. Thanks for sharing.
What software did you use to make this diagram?
It is in the diagram I think: “Excalidraw”
Also never heard of it and always nice to find new FOSS.
It is indeed Excalidraw
Obsidian. I love that it uses simple markdown files so it’s platform agnostic. Documenting my setup has been a lifesaver.
I use the wonderful https://draw.io to sketch up my homelab and which device hosting what service. More fun when it’s vidualized the way I want it 😊
I’ve been using Obsidian for a lot of other purposes for a couple years now, so I was comfortable adding my documentation into my existing vault there. I made a couple templates that I fill out for any hardware/software/networking equipment.
Since the app’s selling point is storing all your notes in plain text I wouldn’t put anything security-related in there without some encrypted container. I use KeePass for that part, and keep the file it generates in the same folder as Obsidian so I can link to it within notes. Click the link in the note, KeePass opens the vault and asks for its password.
I use obsidian too. It supports mermaid too so you can make your network diagram with it.
This is the 2nd ref I’ve seen to mermaid. I need to check that out.
I would not consider Mermaid complete enough for network diagramming. The very basics are possible, but try to describe anything more complicated throws off the placement and makes the pathing whacky.
Straight flow charts are the closest you can get to a network diagram, so if you try to draw a link that travels back up the chart, it breaks mermaid’s brain trying to figure out the order of decision points (network devices).
The allure of text based diagrams is so tantalizing - but if you need them to be functional, it’s not going to happen
There’s an issue tracking the need a new diagram type to handle it.
This is the first I’ve heard of Kroki. A quick glance at their site and wow! So many options for markup. I’ll be trying this out for sure
Mind sharing your template?
Sure.
I left everything in, so no doubt there’s stuff in there specific to my vault you won’t need like metadata - adjust these to your needs or use them as a starting point for something new. There’s no network device template, I usually use the hardware one and just delete the irrelevant bits.
In all honesty, it is a hodge podge. Some are in my dokuwiki, some are plain text, some are markdown, some in my phone, lots on scraps of paper. Just about the time I get it all in one place I scrap my systems and start over.
I’m kinda like that too. But I’m redoing my setup and I wanted to try and redo the way I document things. Or at least try.
