Hey, I have to „draw“ or make notes of my selfhosting stuff. It runs so smooth that I sometimes really forget where a service is running or how to reach the web-Interface.
For sure I have a password- and link-manager, but I would like another independent note with the structure of my selfhosting.
Usually I use Joplin. Is there a plugin that shows me a kind of a map?
Or are there other apps - maybe wikis - that do it much easier/better than that?
How do you document your selfhosting?
I still use Dia Diagram Editor for most things. I just wish it was still being updated.
I kinda just hold it all in my head and fix stuff when I notice it’s broken.
There’s no forgetting where I have something hosted. If I ssh to service.domain.tld I’m on the right server. My services are all in docker compose. All in a ~/docker/service folder, that contains all the volumes for the service. If there’s anything that needed doing, like setting up a docker network or adding a user in the cli, I have a readme file in the service’s root directory. If I need to remember literally anything about the server or service, there’s an appropriately named text file in the directory I would be in when I need to remember it.
If you just want a diagram or something, there are plenty of services online that will generate one in ASCII for you so you can make yourself a nice “network topology” readme to drop in your servers’ home directory.
This is the approach I try to also follow. It also makes the process of restoration from the backups or migrating to different server much easier.
Yeah, and I assume future me will be even dumber than present day me, so I try to make it really easy for him to find out what he needs to know.
Another good tip is to put timestamps and increase the length of your bash history. That way when I log in half a year from now I’ll know what I was up to.
Excalidraw in combination with wikijs, both self hosted of course thru portainer.
I’ve seen some dashboards around, is this what you’re looking for?
Zabbix or Cacti are nice ways to draw maps that also serve a functional role in keeping track of the activity and alerting.
This looks great! I will try Zabbix first! More than I expected. Thank you
Hmmm, I have a few dockers, but most stuff is running in lxc‘s (Proxmox). Btw: I tried Heimdall (or Homar?) but I had to enter all services by hand. Is there a way or an app to automate that?
I’ve used https://draw.io (apparently https://app.diagrams.net/ now) before for this exact purpose. I mapped out network, devices, and services.
Great tool for documenting your setup. I use this at work a lot
And you can self host it!
Just make sure to always be careful with recursion.
If I have to draw diagrams, I use D2 https://d2lang.com/
It’s a very simple to use code to diagram language.
It has plugins for vscode and obsidian.
It’s open source that you can run locally, with the exception of their proprietary visualization engine. But I don’t use that one, just use ELK.
I used to use ansible and helm, but it is overkill for my case. Today I basically use a combo of markdown and bash scripts, the combination of them allows me to run the scripts straight from my IDE.
I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.
I will use that for documenting further stuff. If Zabbix works a few screenshots from there should explain a lot but everything else I would add to the wiki.
I’ve written my wiki so that, if I end up shuffling off this mortal coil, my wife can give access to one of my brothers and they can help her by unpicking all the smart home stuff.
I use Cockpit to manage my system and containers and Dashy as a browser dashboard. It’s similar to Heimdall but more minimal.
I also run Otterwiki and I’m planning on documenting my setup, but I haven’t got around to it yet.
you mentioned you’ve used joplin. All my notes are in markdown and I’ve been using Obsidian instead. Obsidian includes support for mermaid and can render (relatively simple) flowcharts.
https://obsidian.md/ https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/flowchart.html
I’m coding them down as plantuml network code and render them using a selfhosted plantuml Server.
In the end my whole admin guide resides in a obsidian notebook as markdown There is even a plugin that renders plantuml code within obsidian
The nice thing: everything is just code and can be moved to any other tool (had my documentation in a local gitlab repo, but I swapped gitlab out for gitea)
I use Netbox. It’s built by the team at Digital Ocean for managing their infrastructure. It can run in a docker container for easy management and compatibility. You can use as few or as many features as you need. There are a lot of native features and if there’s something missing you can extend functionality with plugins. I use the plugin netbox-topology-views to visualize my physical and logical network maps. This may be overkill for most home labs or home networks.
