I use Ansible, Docker, and Emacs OrgMode files committed to Git. Diagrams are a mix of Miro and Graphviz. There's also a few markdowns in there too. Joplin is used for rough notes only.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Obsidian. I love that it uses simple markdown files so it's platform agnostic. Documenting my setup has been a lifesaver.
Syncthing plays nicely with obsidian if you ever have to synchronise the vault between multiple devices.
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Any chance you wouldn't mind sharing the SSL renewal doc? Redacted of course. Mine is coming up and I'd like to do it correctly this time. :)
I'm using anytype.io, it's been pretty neat so far.
I have a git repo for it, needless to say. And so README.md plus a network diagram from https://app.diagrams.net/
I run a local MediaWiki appliance from turnkeylinux, super easy to spin up in proxmox.
Why not push it up to GitHub? Then you also get a commit history to see your changes overtime.
Wow that sounds convinient, where can i find a guide describing this? Has zero experience with git 😅
There are tons of tutorials around, but the basic gist is that you only use a couple of commands (or even a good frontend) in git, especially when it's a one (wo)man show.
I highly recommend it!
Gotcha. Git is useful in so many way, but it can be confusing to learn. I don’t have a guide on hand but searching for ‘getting started with git’ will get you pretty far.
Another great way to do this that I just thought of this second is using Notion. It is in markdown.
Seems a lot of people are doing that.
Hackmd.io for simple markdown docs.
Comments inside the docker-compose.yml files?
I'm just starting to dip my toes in docker. Most of my stuff is kvm and physical.
Due to a desire to get off Ubuntu I have a goal to rebuild everything on Debian and/or containers and would like to document as I go.
I deploy as much as I possibly can via Ansible. Then the Ansible code serves as the documentation. I also keep the underlying OS the same on all machines to avoid different OS conventions. All my machines run Debian. The few things I cannot express in Ansible, such as network topology, I draw a diagram for in draw.io, but that's it.
Also, why not automate the certificate renewal with certbot? I have two reverse proxies and they renew their certificates themselves.
My reverse proxy can do automated renewal just fine. The SMTP relay requires a DNS challenge that is manual.
Why not have the reverse proxy also do renewal for the SMTP relay certificate and just rsync it to the relay? For a while I had one of my proxies do all the renewals and the other would rsync it.
It certainly wouldn't be because I've been doing it this way for so long that it never occurred to me. Nope. Certainly not that.
In fairness, I very recently switched from a cobbled together apache web server/rev proxy config I've been carrying along in some form for well over a decade (I remember converting the config to 2.4), to an NPM container. I had some initial trouble switching my certs over to NPM and haven't revisited that yet.
I'm in the middle of a major overhaul of my tech stack. Fixing certs is on my short list.
Thanks for pointing out where I was stuck in my ways.
The only thing I save in Google Drive are my notes just in case of disaster.
Frankly the only thing I'd save in Google Docs are encrypted archives. Otherwise they'll profile the documents to send ads to you. But it is a good back up in case lightning strikes your home or something.
I don't save all my documents. Just my self-hosting, servers infraestructure notes. I don't want to have the recovery intructions in the same machine I'm recovering
Are you writing to Google drive directly from the cli? If so how? I regularly need to search, edit, copy, and paste to and from my notes; backup config files; save a neat little script I wrote; etc. all from the CLI. It would be awesome to have this searchable and online from a web browser too for when I'm not working in the terminal. For example, piping an error message to a file and grabbing/sanitizing that error to search later. I have ways, but their all a lot clunkier than simply have a Dropbox. I'm basically looking for something that works just like Dropbox, is not self hosted, and not as cumbersome to setup as NextCloud and the like.
It's not automated. I just have the most important commands to fix/rebuild my sever in case of disasater.