Selfhosted

Here: https://wiki.gardiol.org/

Based on Dokuwiki and my own experience. Mostly started to track what and why I do stuff, and published because I truly believe in a free internet.

It's really a wild growth over the years. My current approach is twofold. Netbox to manage devices/VMs and associated info with service deployments using Ansible. You can use the info from Netbox as an Ansible inventory directly.

Previously I tried network diagrams (too low detail) and spreadsheets (terrible to modify) to document machines. And for serviced I'd have an install page on my wiki (apologies, the codeblocks are somewhat broken atm)

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 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.

Not much, really. I do comment changes to config files and such.

I have it in a git repo, broken down by the nodes and vps names. In each of these folders is a mixture of Ansible playbooks, docker compose or just markdown files with the descriptions. Some is random stuff - my VPS allows the export of the cloud firewalls as JSON for instance. All the secrets needed by Ansible are in an Ansible vault, the rest in KeePass.

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”

I just try to make everything as self documented as possible. Eg. no stray scripts, everything is either implemented in other software (eg. my main wireguard peer in systemd-networkd, without any non-obvious external dependencies) or tracked as a part of an arch pkg with a simple PKGBUILD. I usually either have very simple nets (eg. my VPN's net only consists of four peers, in the order main - secondary - laptop - phone) or leave it to DHCP and SLAAC. I try to avoid using ports for local servers as much as possible and use unix sockets. Stuff like LVM/Luks pretty much documents itself.

A combination of Logseq (what, why, how) and KeePass for IPs and passwords (obviously)... I use the heirarchy in Keepass to show a device and then the services on it and then their configs, ie

• Hypervisor1
  • VM1
    • root user details
    • that webUI details
  • VM2 (Etc)

I used to do Visio drawings, but they were always out of date.

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 just created a note in Obsidian with the Excalidraw plugin.