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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Every time I set up anything, I do one of two things:
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If it’s container based, it gets a commented docker compose file in my custom orchestration
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If it’s on a host system, the changes are scripted and commented in a setup script, which are run on new machines. If the acrit is specific to one machine, it is configured as such
I find in-setup docs to be best for a home lab, plus if I have to replace hardware, it’s fast.
Fun fact, I do it for laptops and desktops, too.
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I don’t, and I know that I’m fucked one day.
The whole deployment is done via ansible, so the ansible source is my documentation.
In gitlab.
In the terraform project that builds it. Or in the cinc.sh config that makes it go.
MD lets me add diagrams.
I use the notes sections in proxmox preeettty heavily. Lots of links to the helper scripts, youtube videos and other resources i used to get er’ goin’.
In the near future I’m really hoping I can set up Netbox to help me document the network and equipment I’m putting in my homelab. a nice thing is that I went through a divorce a while ago and I’m getting to start from scratch. You’d be surprised at just how much you’ve learned since starting to self host and I think there’s this sunk cost fallacy that gets a lot of us to keep going with what we’ve got already set up because we’ve “already put so much work into it” and the concern of what we might lose by scrapping it and starting over.
Also, not what you asked… but if you’re still relatively new with proxmox you should check out the ProxmoxVE helper scripts. Lots of good automated scripts from doing a post-install to setting up various LXC containers and VM’s
I keep a very rudimentary README.md with some basic info on the services I run. I should probably set up a personal wiki to keep track of everything better
Perhaps more importantly, I also maintain a document with all the scheduled tasks that run, including what it is, how it’s defined, when it runs, and what device runs it. Really helpful for making sure cron jobs don’t run during a backup script or something
I just set up everything via ansible and comment everything religiously, I’ve gotten to the point where I have playbooks for my laptop and desktop so if I have do do a clean install I just have to run the playbook and everything is set up and installed to my liking
It’s annoying to go to my playbook to make changes and rerun it every time I want to install or remove anything from my daily PCs, but it pays off when I migrate computers or for some reason have to do a clean install
And for high level stuff and things not in ansible I keep a tiddlywiki since no matter how catastrophic the failure of my systems I can always find a way to access an HTML file for my own reference
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.
Brill. One of us.
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
My wife was mentioning the other day that if something happened to me she’d have absolutely no idea how to work any of this shit and that convinced me to actually start documenting it LMAO
Good time to start doing it too. Aside from setting up a NAS this weekend and figuring out an audiobook solution (not something I’ve ever dabbled with but I really should start reading some communist theory), I’ve got this project right where I want it for a long while.
I operate on the philosophy that it is better for me to relearn things than lean on old documentation that may no longer be accurate/relevant.
The best way to implement a safe connection to my home lab today might not be the safest way tomorrow.
Old dog, new tricks, etc.
Also! Your documentation is an attackers wet dream.
NB: this philosophy doesn’t scale.
Security by obscurity, baby!
What I don’t know, no phisher can get out of me!
I’m gonna try this neat trick at work
I do this continually for work as well, I approach every new project assuming best practice or approach options have changed. It doesn’t matter how experienced I am in what I’m doing, I still loop back and check.
It’s such an automatic thing I don’t even think about it, but honestly not sure if it’s because of interest or because of fear of being called out for doing something wrong lol
“Shit, i hope i remeber the key words i searched for”
Guilty too. There are names on router- and switch interfaces. Servers get fixed IP from dhcp so is in the note field there too. That’s about it
Lol.
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.
This really is the way.
It goes beyond documentation too - it allows me to migrate to new hosts or to easily automate upgrading the OS release version.
I have a docusaurus site for my homeland and I have ansible and terraform generate files for the docs so I don’t have to record anything. Some of the stuff I note down:
- DNS leases
- General infra diagrams
- IP info
- Host info
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 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.
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.
