My entire network documentation is a single Discord DM to myself. IPs, ports, what I broke last Tuesday. Searchable, timestamped, and I'm in Discord anyway for the Minecraft server chat. Zero friction.
instant noodles, instant deploys
What do you use for documenting your network that you'll actually maintain?
I paid for Obsidian Sync for a year to solve this. Beautiful graphs, backlinks, the whole cult experience. Updated it religiously for six weeks. Last edit was March. The graph view now looks like a conspiracy board with half the strings cut.
In Morocco we have power cuts that don't respect your uptime. My documentation is whatever I can reconstruct from the configs after the UPS dies. I have learned to write very verbose hostnames. Router-livingroom-192.168.10.1-dhcp-reserved-printer-brother is a real hostname in my network.
Following. I've tried everything and my current approach is just not documenting, which is clearly not working.
The only thing that works for me is making documentation a prerequisite for change. Ansible playbook won't run without a --tags that includes a ticket number, and the ticket template forces three lines of "what did you change and why." It's annoying but it's the only enforcement that stuck.
This thread is depressing because it's all true. I have a LibreNMS install that emails me when things break. I added a "notes" module and started putting "why this alert exists" in there. It's not network architecture docs but it's the only living documentation I have because the context is attached to the pain.
Paulo3 said:
Shared Google Sheet for IP allocations
Same. São Paulo here too, and between the latency to anything hosted in US-East and the cost of anything local, a Google Sheet is what actually loads when I need it. I tried self-hosting IPAM and gave up after the third time I needed an IP while mobile on 4G.
polskiegsm
Member
Tanie serwery, tania dokumentacja. I use a private GitHub gist for my network. One file, markdown, edit on phone if needed. The key was stopping myself from making it structured. No tables, no diagrams, just bullet points and dates.
I maintain a /r/homelab wiki page for my own setup. Nobody reads it but me, but the social pressure of it being public makes me update it more than my private notes ever did. Performance anxiety as documentation strategy.
ARM boards don't have the RAM for heavy wiki software. My entire "documentation" is a single org-mode file that renders to HTML on a cron job. It's ugly, it's on a subdomain I forget, but org-capture lets me append from anywhere in Emacs in three keystrokes. The tool fits the friction budget.
one small ping for man...