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?
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.
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.
Everything is deployed via ansible - including nameservices. So I already have the description of my infra in ansible, and rest is just a matter of writing scripts to pull it in a more readable form, and maybe add a few comment labels that also get extracted for easily forgettable admin URLs.
You should definitely figure out some infra as code system now while it’s manageable. Normally I’d recommend docker-compose as it’s very easy to learn and has a huge ecosystem, but since you’re using proxmox you might need to look at ansible like the other commenter said. Having IaC with git makes it so much easier to test new stuff, roll changes back, and all that good stuff, in addition to solving your original problem of forgetting what is running where.
Just find the simplest IaC solution possible. Unless you are gunning for a job in infrastructure you don’t need to go into kubernetes or terraform or anything like that, you just need something reproducible that you can easily understand and modify.
Unless you are gunning for a job in infrastructure you don’t need to go into kubernetes or terraform or anything like that,
Even then knowing when not to use k8s or similar things is often more valuable than having deep knowledge of those - a lot of stuff where I see k8s or similar stuff used doesn’t have the uptime requirements to warrant the complexity. If I have something that just should be up during working hours, and have reliable monitoring plus the ability to re-deploy it via ansible within 10 minutes if it goes poof maybe putting a few additional layers that can blow up in between isn’t the best idea.
Oh for sure for sure. I just know that a lot of people use their homelab to learn skills that they can put on their resume when looking for a job. It’s totally fair to over engineer your self hosting setup if that’s your goal.
I was referring to work setups with the overengineering - if I had a cent for every time I had to argue with somebody at work to not make things more complex than we actually need I’d have retired a long time ago.
My stuff is all in docker-compose with a stack/service structure, so listing it is as simple as running tree, and reading the individual YAML files if I need in-depth details.
KISS ! That’s the way I’m doing it. Although it kinda gets more difficult to keep track of every docker image update after you have a dozen containers.
Thinking of something that could keep track and give me a nice notification about the changes and give a link to the github page before updating the container.
Thanks :)) I did tried it out a few month ago. It works as expected, but I was looking for something with a nice webUI wich pulls the whole changelog before updating a container.
An AIO web interface that give all the changes and expected bugs or issues. I know there isn’t something like that… That’s why I just look out for github notifications with an RSS feed and read through all the changes/issues before doing any updates.
I use Heimdall and Portainer myself, and I’d recommend them both. Portainer is for keeping a visual on Docker and/or Kubernetes containers, while Heimdall acts as a “home page” / front end for your various web GUIs (incl. Portainer).
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?
Sadly, not to my knowledge. It’s an app-by-app process. I could see an Ansible play or similar potentially fulfilling such a role, but I’m not aware of any existing projects.
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 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.
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.
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)
Draw.io is also totally open and is able to be integrated into many different tools - so chances are your tool of choice already has a plug in for it. For example, nextcloud does.
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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.
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
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.
Everything is deployed via ansible - including nameservices. So I already have the description of my infra in ansible, and rest is just a matter of writing scripts to pull it in a more readable form, and maybe add a few comment labels that also get extracted for easily forgettable admin URLs.
Self documenting systems ftw.
That sounds to complicate for me. I am still a beginner.
You should definitely figure out some infra as code system now while it’s manageable. Normally I’d recommend docker-compose as it’s very easy to learn and has a huge ecosystem, but since you’re using proxmox you might need to look at ansible like the other commenter said. Having IaC with git makes it so much easier to test new stuff, roll changes back, and all that good stuff, in addition to solving your original problem of forgetting what is running where.
Just find the simplest IaC solution possible. Unless you are gunning for a job in infrastructure you don’t need to go into kubernetes or terraform or anything like that, you just need something reproducible that you can easily understand and modify.
Even then knowing when not to use k8s or similar things is often more valuable than having deep knowledge of those - a lot of stuff where I see k8s or similar stuff used doesn’t have the uptime requirements to warrant the complexity. If I have something that just should be up during working hours, and have reliable monitoring plus the ability to re-deploy it via ansible within 10 minutes if it goes poof maybe putting a few additional layers that can blow up in between isn’t the best idea.
Oh for sure for sure. I just know that a lot of people use their homelab to learn skills that they can put on their resume when looking for a job. It’s totally fair to over engineer your self hosting setup if that’s your goal.
I was referring to work setups with the overengineering - if I had a cent for every time I had to argue with somebody at work to not make things more complex than we actually need I’d have retired a long time ago.
My stuff is all in docker-compose with a stack/service structure, so listing it is as simple as running
tree, and reading the individual YAML files if I need in-depth details.KISS ! That’s the way I’m doing it. Although it kinda gets more difficult to keep track of every docker image update after you have a dozen containers.
Thinking of something that could keep track and give me a nice notification about the changes and give a link to the github page before updating the container.
Watchtower may be what you’re looking for.
Thanks :)) I did tried it out a few month ago. It works as expected, but I was looking for something with a nice webUI wich pulls the whole changelog before updating a container.
An AIO web interface that give all the changes and expected bugs or issues. I know there isn’t something like that… That’s why I just look out for github notifications with an RSS feed and read through all the changes/issues before doing any updates.
I’ve seen some dashboards around, is this what you’re looking for?
I use Heimdall and Portainer myself, and I’d recommend them both. Portainer is for keeping a visual on Docker and/or Kubernetes containers, while Heimdall acts as a “home page” / front end for your various web GUIs (incl. Portainer).
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?
Sadly, not to my knowledge. It’s an app-by-app process. I could see an Ansible play or similar potentially fulfilling such a role, but I’m not aware of any existing projects.
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’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.
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 kinda just hold it all in my head and fix stuff when I notice it’s broken.
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 like draw.io for process diagrams.
You can even self-host it and use it with Nextcloud.
Draw.io is also totally open and is able to be integrated into many different tools - so chances are your tool of choice already has a plug in for it. For example, nextcloud does.