I have a few options to set-up my personal journal and I intend to journal my process of how to, what’s the practical way of writing it all down with writing everything down ?
That’s the neat part, you don’t
Just some scripts and config files in external git at the moment but usually I just get my refrence form other VMs. Probably going with obsidian or other markdown editor and upload notes to somewhere if disaster strikes.
Infrastructure as code, the code that is your homelab should be the documentation of it.
Infrastructure as code
I use Joplin for my wiki/documentation tool. I like that it supports markdown and can be exported as markdown if needed. Also the variety of plugins is a plus.
Joplin organizes my life. Without it, I’d be lost. Like, for anything.
What size tires do I need to swap my bike? How did I configure my samba shares? How do I setup VFIO passthrough? What’s the name of that guy I hate at work? (Fuck you, Nick) How much did it cost to have the tree in my back yard removed? Can I see the invoice?
All these questions I can lookup and solve using my Joplin database. Without Joplin, life gets way harder.
Love Joplin
Mkdocs, grav
https://silverbullet.md/ and I may start using https://d2lang.com/ too.
Logseq
I blog it. https://static.xtremeownage.com/
Read it(pun intended), it was cool.
Obsidian with it’s folders/files in a location that gets duplicated to another drive by rsync.
Bookstack (/r/BookStack)
Poorly.
self hosted git repository.
I setup gitea on my server and use it to track version changes of all my scripts.
And I use a combination of the wiki and .md (readme) files for howto’s and any inventory I’m keeping, like IP addresses, CPU assignments etc.
But mainly it’s all in .md formatted with markdown.
Bookstack is such an amazing tool. Just make a shelf for Homelab, books for each aspect like VMs, docker, etc. Then have a chapter for each VM or app and them pages can be installation, running, issues, troubleshooting, significant upgrades, etc. It’s important to actually take note of it all and not just grab URLs for your resources because if those pages are removed then you’re screwed.
About 2 years ago I came to the conclusion that my personal documentation for tech stuff is non existent. Some excel sheet here, a saved TXT in c:\temp over there, the occasional “I still need tot rewrite and save this unsaved file in Notepad++” combined with a bunch of google keep notes.
I ended up installing Wordpress with https://basepresskb.com/docs/knowledge-base/basepress/
I use it for virtually everything. From documenting the build of a server to simply logging expensive household equipment with extended warranty.