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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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What do you use to document your home lab? (lemmy.procrastinati.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

ansible, self-documenting. My playbook.yml has a list of roles attached to each host, each host's host_vars file has details on service configuration (domains, etc). It looks like this: https://pastebin.com/6b2Lb0Mg

Additionally 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.

[–] xcjs 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was going to recommend Ansible as well - documentation as code can never be out of date if you continue using it.

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