Leaving sarcasm aside, I was wondering if any of you have a manual for the family about your homelab in case of a sudden demise. I am not referring only to a password list; I am talking about infrastructure, hardware, etc.
I have been considering making one but I am not sure where to start and what to actually write in it.
Looking forward to your thoughts, solutions or actual manuals.
LE: Thank you all for your replies. I will reply as soon as possible to everything that I can.
Use this.
I dunno. There is no chance my family can upkeep this hacky ass infrastructure
No point. None of my family would understand any of it and would just sell it all for scrap metal prolly.
I have an IT friend that has direction (family knows this) to properly wipe my server/hardware storage/configurations and sell it on eBay for a 15% cut. No one is smart enough or would care enough to maintain what I have so it’s a moot point. Unless your famous, most of your life’s memories and possessions will fit in a shoebox within 6 months of your death. So might as well not burden your family and loved ones with what they would see as e-waste.
I have a physical piece of paper in a Fire and Water proof document safe that my wife and sister each have a key to. The paper contains the recovery keys to my password manager. Keeper Security, it has everything they would need to access whatever they need. My home lab is all documented in OneNote.
Currently in the process of restarting my homelab (my previous lab expired due to a flood) and this is something I’m very much thinking about given my increasing age.
I’m looking at hosting bookstack, given it has an option to create pdf copies of it’s “books”.
View being not so much to give my wife enough information, but to allow her the ability to reach out to a friend of ours, who also works in IT, and be able to hand him the documentation for him to help roll her back to just what she needs.
Everything is written in a book. If I die any nerd they hire should be able to figure out how to at least nuke everything prior to sale. Has a network map and corresponding password list all hand written.
The sad part is they never want to know HOW it works. Only when you’re dead will they see your value lol
One piece of paper for the family that says rtfm and I know that’s tldr for them…. It will all end in the trash and they will end up running a 1990s blue Liksys router with an aol connected purple translucent iMac riddled with malware. With the jokes aside, Visio, spreadsheet, and all code documented in GitHub because I’m ocd…
Told Wifey when I pass, call ISP, have them hit all the reset buttons, re-wire everything for simplest config. My son gets the hardware.
I started this process and documentation. Ive got about 40 docs so far that works through everything from passwords, hard drives, data inventory (find X on Y drive …), documented structure, documented data management, schematics how things are connected, warranties, serial numbers, you name it.
It’s all for me. When I die, my wife won’t even know how to turn the sound on for movies, and likely doesn’t even know how to get on our wifi if she had a new device not set up.
Basically, when I’m gone, some attorney needs to hire some need to follow my guide and get my family what they need.
I would create a backup server that is in a PC tower case. Some desktop Linux as an operating system. Data is on NTFS formatted harddrives so that it can be read from windows PCs. The computer has automatic login or the password is well known to my family.
Any services I provide / host the people can do without more or less. They will care about the fotos, the non-movie type videos like home videos, my document library or any digital work I or they have produced that I keep safe for them.
They won’t care for any bulk data like blueray rips or mp3 music or audiobooks. They are able to just buy access to that.
That does not take into account any smarthome stuff, that’s a different conversation.
I have a mediawiki I run internally that has info on my network and everything setup. That way my wife can run things after I am gone. It still needs work because it is not complete but it is there so she can run things.
The trick is to have a perpetually non-functioning lab, so if you die, there’s nothing to maintain.
Just print your photos every once in a while, the rest of the stuff probably isn’t of much interest to anyone else.
None of my stuff can be maintained without me, so really all my partner/family would need to do it wipe the disks and sell the hardware.
I am not healthy, but Im trying to get better. Either way, I will be documenting for friends that can help my family. Family wont know what to do with it, but it is worth it in this case.
Told my family to take the rack outside piece by piece and pour some gasoline on it and just lit that shit on fire.
In a fireproof safe in my office (which my wife has access to) is a note with my Vaultwarden master password as well as a network diagram, reasonable instructions on how to troubleshoot and maintain everything, basic hardware maintenance guides and so on.
But since my wife has the IT literacy of an angry silverback gorilla, the safe also contains a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an SSD that get a nightly rsync of all the family photos and videos as well as digital copies of all my important documentation (insurance, bank accounts etc). That’s all she will really want