I just set up everything via ansible and comment everything religiously, I’ve gotten to the point where I have playbooks for my laptop and desktop so if I have do do a clean install I just have to run the playbook and everything is set up and installed to my liking

It’s annoying to go to my playbook to make changes and rerun it every time I want to install or remove anything from my daily PCs, but it pays off when I migrate computers or for some reason have to do a clean install

And for high level stuff and things not in ansible I keep a tiddlywiki since no matter how catastrophic the failure of my systems I can always find a way to access an HTML file for my own reference

I am fortunate enough to only manage a homelab and not an enterprise sized network. So I don’t document anything just like at work.

Lol.

Jokes aside, I do keep some harder to remember stuff written down in a README.md in my repo, but mainly most things are undocumented

I refused to do any documentation for a long time because it made me feel stupid for not memorizing it. I learned it the hard way… Now I document everything possible with Git and Readmes.

I download the YouTube tutorials I followed, upload them to my UAT Jellyfin server, and then when my server is having issues I can’t get to the videos!

A flawless system really

I use different things:

• Netbox for the actual hard “inventory” like documentation. What cable goes where, what powers what, what MAC is assigned to what, when did I buy this or that?(The later with an addon). In theory I also have snipe-it,but doing it all in netplan is more convenient.

• Wiki.js for the concept and How-To-Side. Lots of draw.io diagrams (which can be done directly in articles), HOWTOs as a reminder for me, naming conventions, etc. Also some basic inventory information for disaster recovery. (Wiki.js is not hosted locally)

• Vaultwarden for all secrets,passwords, recovery keys, ssh keys,etc.

• Gitea for the most important config files/scripts/docker compose files.

• And last but not least I do backups to Mdisc Blue Rays every few months. These include the documentation, the most important files (knx project for example), etc. and are stored at a different location (bank safe). There is also an detailled explanation in both my wifes and my own will how to access these so if something happens the kiddos or someone taking care of them can gain access.

I build my infrastructure with the terraform, Ansible and helm charts. The code is it’s own documentation as well as comments in that code explaining why I’ve done things if it’s not obvious.

95% of my homelab lives on a single server, and everything I do is within containers. So, my documentation is just keeping all my compose files in a git repo and writing in comments when necessary. It’s fairly self-documenting, and I haven’t found the need to break out of just using containers for everything, besides a couple things like setting up mergerfs or cockpit, but that’s all plug and play nowadays with stuff like https://projectucore.io/

Of course, I don’t have any other things set up in my physical layout or network stack… but all that stuff would probably just go into an entry in my notes (obsidian/wiki.vim).

I generally just make notes in Obsidian, mostly about switch ports, VLANs, IP assignments and that kind of thing.

Also try to save snippets of commands or config edits I needed to get something obtuse working in case I need to do it again later.

Secrets go in Keepass.

For server configs, a LibreOffice Writer file per machine (except for RPs, I only have one for those), written as a didactic manual explaining how to install and configure everything (I work on bare metal still). I started that way since diving into self-hosting was also a way to learn Linux, Sys-Admin and web-hosting. I don’t do anything without updating the relevant chapters, or creating new ones. Not gonna lie: it’s tedious. But also a life-saver, and the rationals for my choices remain available years later, which is priceless in many ways.

Once upon a time I had neat network gear running, and I mostly YOLO-ed the doc for those, relying instead on the firmware/config backups. I had to put those devices away, but when I finally get to play with them again, I’m going to suffer re-learning and re-discovering everything.

Recently, I got to hack and old console, and just did a chronological log-file with actions taken and URLs to guides, instead of writing down everything myself. It got me thinking I might add a simple log-file to track my actions, on top of my usual guides.

Or not. Having a life is nice too 😅

I’m curious how everyone documents their core/critical configs to allow the non-technical in our homes work with it if needed. For instance if I’m on work travel and the Pi-hole goes down for whatever reason my wife wouldn’t be able to use pretty much anything online. I can remote in and fix it but that could be hours/a day or two later. Same then for the proxmox stack that everything runs on.

Along the same lines, how are folks documenting for EOL? It may not be a happy thought but we are all going to go someday, so what is your plan and how have you ensured loved ones can access/save important data?

I just created a note in Obsidian with the Excalidraw plugin.

The Ansible playbooks I use to deploy it are the documentation.

NixOS’s declarative configurations basically document themsleves: add some comments and you’re good to go and can back then up to wherever whenever