Member OP
40 servers and a spreadsheet? Ive been there! Hostname tells me everything! Pve-frankfurt-2019-dont-touch!
Who needs documentation when you have terror and memory! But Seriously what do you all use? NetBox? Racktables? Excel with prayer? Tell me your secrets!
Member
NetBox. Full stop.
Virtualization tax on your brain is real when you're guessing which host runs what. Spreadsheet chaos scales linearly; NetBox scales with your ASN. I migrated 60 hosts last year. IPAM, circuits, device roles, all in one. OpenVZ-era tools won't cut it.
Kernel-level detail: if you're not tracking cgroup limits per host, you're flying blind. Documentation is infrastructure. Treat it like one.
Member
Seriously though, 40 servers without asset tracking? You're one disk failure from archaeology. I label physical drives with purchase date and pool. NetBox handles the rest. Hardware without history is just scrap metal.
Member
I tried NetBox once and it was tuesday and I had just finished a sandwich which was Turkey and Swiss and the cat knocked over my coffee and I spent three hours cleaning up and then I forgot what I was doing and went back to my spreadsheet which has forty seven tabs and one is just called "help" and another is "help2" and I color code everything but the colors dont mean anything anymore and I have a tab for what I ate each day a server died and the weather that day and nobody appreciates my system and I get angry when people suggest NetBox because I already tried and the cat didnt like it and neither did I and now im yelling and im not sorry
Openvz-era tools? Racktables still runs.
Member
Docker Compose. One file. Ten minutes. I have done this migration three times now.
The real cost is not the install. It is the data entry. But you pay that cost once, or you pay it every time a disk dies at 3am and you are grepping dmesg through a KVM lagging like a dreamcast.
Member
This.
I use a private Git repo with Markdown files per host. Ansible inventory pulls from it. Not pretty but it moves with my deployments.
NetBox felt like adopting a second job. Maybe I am lazy.
Member
This is the real answer for a lot of us. Static inventory from Git, dynamic from NetBox. Hybrid approach. I do not track ZFS pool layouts in NetBox though. That lives in a script that emails me monthly. Some things are too fluid for a database with history you do not want to explain.
40 servers is luxury. I have six and I write host details in a notebook. Paper. The kind with lines. Lima humidity makes the ink run but it still works when power goes out, which is often.
NetBox is for people with generators.
