this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Hello, how do you document your home lab? Whether it's a small server or a big one with firewall and more nodes. I have a small pc with Proxmox and there I have a VM with OpnSense. After I've entered my VPN as a interface in OpenSense, I noticed that I slowly lose the overview with the different rules that I have built in my firewall. And I know that my setup is relatively easy in comparison to others here in this community. I want to have a quick Overview at the various VMs, like the Lxc container, Docker containers that I have in this and the IP addresses that I have assigned to them. I search for a simple an intuitiv way for beginners.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

There's no such thing as too simple to document. If you spent time learning how to install it, you'll need to relearn it if you want to make any changes in the future. If you don't leave at least some notes as to why you make some decisions, you'll have to redo your work.

It's also good to make notes on every configuration setting. That forces you to understand why the settings are the way they are. If you have a -f in a docker config and you don't have any understanding of why that's there, you might not know if it's a development flag for getting things set up, or if it's a critical part of your environment.

It is especially important if any of those parts are exposed to the public Internet. You might have a config set to allow unauthenticated connections and not know it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

i mean charitably you could say that your code / architecture should be self documenting, versus having to rely on READMEs / wikis

in effect, if you change the code you are by definition also changing the documentation, since the file names/function names/hierarchy is clear and unambiguous

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

It’s also good to make notes on every configuration setting.

I do save my settings for the various programs in a git repository...