I’d like to start doing a better job of tracking the changes I made to my homelab environment. Hardware, software, network, etc. I’m just not sure what path I want to take and was hoping to get some recommendations. So far the thoughts I have are:

  • A change history sub-section of my wiki. (I’m not a fan of this idea.)
  • A ticketing system of some sort. (I tried this one and it was too heavy. I’d need to find a simple solution.)
  • A nextcloud task list.
  • Self-host a gitlab instance, make a project for changes and track with issues. Move what stuff I have in github to this instance and kill my github projects. (It’s all private stuff.)

I know that several of you are going to say “config as code” and I get it. But I’m not there yet and I want to track the changes I’m making today.

Thanks

  • ShertsonEnglish
    2•9 months ago

    I’m in the same boat.

    Past: My notes are all over the place. Some are in paper notebooks, on scraps of paper, index cards. Some are plain text files, some are markdown; dumped into random folders (had some in my yyyy/mm/dd folders for my journaling, some in project folders) some are on a wiki, some in redmine, some in openproject. I’ve tried different bug tracking apps, but as mentioned, they (like project management apps) are too burdensome.

    Current: For now I am using Joplin for my active notes (and slowly migrating historical notes as I have energy). I have a top level notebook for my homelab, then a subnotebook broken down by subject (infrastructure, app/service, hardware), then individual pages for each specific item (host os setup, vpn, application, etc). On those individual pages, I have it sectioned out; Goal, Research notes, Actions taken, results.

    • Personal Notes
    • Journal
    • Inbox
    • Homelab
      • Infrastructure
        • Host OS
        • VPN
        • NFS
      • Services
        • Radicale
        • Audiobookshelf
        • etc
      • Hardware
        • node 1
        • node 2
        • node 3
        • router

    Future step: Once I have something figured out and ready for “prod”, I will be wiping it out and redoing it all through ansible. I’ll take that playbook and a clean markdown doc with the important details and put them in git. That way I can rebuild it later if there is a tragedy.