Change tracking ideas

𝓢𝓮𝓮𝓙𝓪𝔂𝓔𝓶𝓶@lemmy.procrastinati.org to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 22 points –

I'd like to start doing a better job of tracking the changes I made to my homelab environment. Hardware, software, network, etc. I'm just not sure what path I want to take and was hoping to get some recommendations. So far the thoughts I have are:

  • A change history sub-section of my wiki. (I'm not a fan of this idea.)
  • A ticketing system of some sort. (I tried this one and it was too heavy. I'd need to find a simple solution.)
  • A nextcloud task list.
  • Self-host a gitlab instance, make a project for changes and track with issues. Move what stuff I have in github to this instance and kill my github projects. (It's all private stuff.)

I know that several of you are going to say "config as code" and I get it. But I'm not there yet and I want to track the changes I'm making today.

Thanks

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I'm in the same boat.

Past: My notes are all over the place. Some are in paper notebooks, on scraps of paper, index cards. Some are plain text files, some are markdown; dumped into random folders (had some in my yyyy/mm/dd folders for my journaling, some in project folders) some are on a wiki, some in redmine, some in openproject. I've tried different bug tracking apps, but as mentioned, they (like project management apps) are too burdensome.

Current: For now I am using Joplin for my active notes (and slowly migrating historical notes as I have energy). I have a top level notebook for my homelab, then a subnotebook broken down by subject (infrastructure, app/service, hardware), then individual pages for each specific item (host os setup, vpn, application, etc). On those individual pages, I have it sectioned out; Goal, Research notes, Actions taken, results.

  • Personal Notes
  • Journal
  • Inbox
  • Homelab
    • Infrastructure
      • Host OS
      • VPN
      • NFS
    • Services
      • Radicale
      • Audiobookshelf
      • etc
    • Hardware
      • node 1
      • node 2
      • node 3
      • router

Future step: Once I have something figured out and ready for "prod", I will be wiping it out and redoing it all through ansible. I'll take that playbook and a clean markdown doc with the important details and put them in git. That way I can rebuild it later if there is a tragedy.

I have the beginnings of a similar structure in my wiki but I wasn't happy with the way I was tracking todos, fixes, changes.