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?
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.
I’ve used https://draw.io (apparently https://app.diagrams.net/ now) before for this exact purpose. I mapped out network, devices, and services.
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.
Zabbix or Cacti are nice ways to draw maps that also serve a functional role in keeping track of the activity and alerting.
I kinda just hold it all in my head and fix stuff when I notice it’s broken.
