When you have many systems and platforms to manage in home lab environment, you will need to find a good way to keep records of everything, including the credentials, how they were set up, how to upgrade them, how to back up and some emergency solutions if anything breaks, etc. Not like in corporate environment where you have commercial tools which provide very efficient and convenient functions for you to do such thing, generally as an individual, we don’t have the budget to purchase all these well functioning commercial tools, so we need to figure out a good way, free or not that expensive, to get things done.
There is a Chinese old saying, “Grinding a chopper will not hold up the work of cutting firewood”. It literally means more preparation may quicken the speed in doing work. More often than not, we find ourselves in such a situation: We were attracted by some new technology or we wanted to test something, so we set up a lab environment and did what we wanted to do, or partially. Then some days later, we might come back to what we left, but don’t remember how it was set up or some of the credentials. Or we have changed something but didn’t keep the changes in the same documentation we created originally. Then we need to spend quite some time to figure everything out before we can continue what we want to do. That means, we keep doing the first phase of work again and again before we can continue to do something new.
I realised that issue years ago when I started learning programming and tried to keep what I had learnt, what issues I had experienced and what I had completed, etc. in the notebook of OneNote. It worked well back then and I could continue doing what I had left without spending much efforts to do the previous work I had completed. Then, I changed the computers I use and also the tools I rely on daily, mainly from Windows to Mac, Android phones to iPhone. And I tried to replicate the same way to the new platforms. It worked but a new problem occurred and I didn’t pay much attention to it at the very beginning and it becomes bigger and I need to sort that out before I am getting big trouble. The problem is I keep the notes and records to the tools I have by that time but haven’t done any merge and comparison among these tools and platforms. There are some differences on the same system and environment I have across different recording tools and platforms which begin to cause me trouble when I want to start working on something.
What I need to do is to compare these tools and platforms and make sure the information they have are consistent and up to date and delete what is not valid any more. The better picture is to find a tool available to all the platforms I have, Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and NAS and it will be even better if they can sync automatically. OneNote is something that meets the requirement but I prefer something more professional as that will include password, diagram, documentations, etc. I don’t know. Maybe OneNote or some other tools I already have should already work for my needs as after all, it’s a small infra which is not that complicated, only having several hosts, vms, nas, and cloud hosts from Tencent, Azure and AWS, but how knows how things will develop. Maybe it will get more complicated. So it does not harm to find a more powerful tool. Grinding a chopper will not hold up the work of cutting firewood