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

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    A wiki sounds like the right thing since you want to be able to see the current and previous versions of things. It’s a bit easier to edit than straight Markdown in git, which is the other option I’d do. Ticketing systems like OpenProject are more useful for tracking many different pieces of work simultaneously, including future work. The process of changing your current networking setup from A to B would be tracked in OpenProject. New equipment to buy, cabling to do, software to install, descibing it in your wiki, and the progress on each of those. Your wiki would be in state A before you begin this ticket. Once you finish it, your wiki will be in state B. While in progress, the wiki would be somewhere between A and B. You could of course use just the wiki but it’s nice to have a place where you can keep track of all the other things including being able to leave comments that provide context which allows you to resume at a later point in time. At several workplaces the standard setup that always gets entrenched is a ticketing system, a wiki and a version control. Version is only needed for tasks that include code. So the absolute core are the other two. If I had to reduce to a single solution, I’d choose a wiki since I could use separate wiki pages to track my progress as I go from A to B.