this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
136 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

46672 readers
730 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
136
How do you document your Homelab? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
69 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It's really a wild growth over the years. My current approach is twofold. Netbox to manage devices/VMs and associated info with service deployments using Ansible. You can use the info from Netbox as an Ansible inventory directly.

Previously I tried network diagrams (too low detail) and spreadsheets (terrible to modify) to document machines. And for serviced I'd have an install page on my wiki (apologies, the codeblocks are somewhat broken atm)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I run Netbox for documentation only. But your approach is what I actually wanted to do, if I just had plenty of time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

I use netbox too - and if you're careful about it, you can actually use terraform to create the netbox details. I use one manifest file to handle deployment to Proxmox, set up DNS in PowerDNS, and create the relevant netbox entries.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

The way you go about it on your wiki, is almost the same process/format, tho not as fancy . I'll even throw in a couple links to tuts I found useful for that particular segment in the notes.