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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This seems pretty vanilla based on what other have suggested but I use regular markdown files in a git repo.
For data flows or diagrams, mermaidJS syntax within the markdown file works wonders and when I need to link one document to another or one section to another, you can use the normal link syntax of markdown.
Easy to use, hardly any setup and easily accessible.
I know that I would keep forgetting to update the docs, so my documentation are the ansible playbooks and docker-compose.yaml files that I use to set it all up.
That leaves anything that has to be done in some Ui undocumented, so I try to keep that to a minimum, which isn't always easy (I'm looking at you authentik!).
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.
I have a git repo for it, needless to say. And so README.md plus a network diagram from https://app.diagrams.net/
Any chance you wouldn't mind sharing the SSL renewal doc? Redacted of course. Mine is coming up and I'd like to do it correctly this time. :)
I'm using anytype.io, it's been pretty neat so far.
I run a local MediaWiki appliance from turnkeylinux, super easy to spin up in proxmox.
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 😅
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!
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.
Seems a lot of people are doing that.
Hackmd.io for simple markdown docs.
I deploy as much as I possibly can via Ansible. Then the Ansible code serves as the documentation. I also keep the underlying OS the same on all machines to avoid different OS conventions. All my machines run Debian. The few things I cannot express in Ansible, such as network topology, I draw a diagram for in draw.io, but that's it.
Also, why not automate the certificate renewal with certbot? I have two reverse proxies and they renew their certificates themselves.
My reverse proxy can do automated renewal just fine. The SMTP relay requires a DNS challenge that is manual.
Why not have the reverse proxy also do renewal for the SMTP relay certificate and just rsync it to the relay? For a while I had one of my proxies do all the renewals and the other would rsync it.
It certainly wouldn't be because I've been doing it this way for so long that it never occurred to me. Nope. Certainly not that.
In fairness, I very recently switched from a cobbled together apache web server/rev proxy config I've been carrying along in some form for well over a decade (I remember converting the config to 2.4), to an NPM container. I had some initial trouble switching my certs over to NPM and haven't revisited that yet.
I'm in the middle of a major overhaul of my tech stack. Fixing certs is on my short list.
Thanks for pointing out where I was stuck in my ways.
Some stuff is in Joplin, some stuff is in wiki.js. Joplin lacks organization features. Wiki.js stores stuff in database and has problems with search, both are possible to fix, I believe...
Occasionally I remember about problems with this setup, but I'm too lazy to fix or replace it
The only thing I save in Google Drive are my notes just in case of disaster.