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.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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 😅

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

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?

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

I have NixOS running on mine and I write everything in comments in my configuration.nix. Usually I’ll write notes about why I set a certain option above the line where I do it but I also have a section at the start that describes anything to be aware of if I’m moving this configuration to another machine. For example “This assumes a drive is mounted on /mnt/backup0”

🧠 + a few slapdash notes in a password manager. It’s very organic, very human.

Occasionally leads to situations like this.

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