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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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.
fuck yeahhh man that sounds like the absolute best. I’m really looking forward to the time when i get to learn Ansible
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
RIP Tteck! (not sure if i spelled it right)
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 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 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”Trillium notes
But what about the documentation to host the note server?
I run nixos, so my entire homelab servers setup is stored in my github. I can rebuild a server and restore backups from that (and sops keys). I significantly prefer this to having to remember and note a huge bunch of things to setup a computer - this way a rebuild on new oc is only a few hours tops
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
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.
while security might be compromised if an attacker found your documentation, it could equally be compromised by having zero documentation
the easier it is for you to get things back up and running in the event of a data loss / corrupted hard drive / new machine / etc, the less likely you are to forget any crucial steps (eg setting up iptables or ufw)
Having 0 documentation doesn’t mean you have no DLP strategy. That’s amateur hour.
And again, NB: this does not scale.
