Not about design patterns, but about making preparations: https://github.com/potatoqualitee/eol-dr

Write a document that describes the main points of your setup. That’s about it. You don’t have to teach them everything, just guide them. Like, if you use a certain Linux distro and Docker just say “I use Docker on Debian and the compose files are in that directory”. That should be enough to get someone started if they know Linux and Docker, and if they don’t they’re not going to learn it from your doc, they should go looking for someone who does.

Let’s face it, many of our self-hosted setups are DIY setups we make as a hobby. If you really want an out-of-the-box experience that can be administered by a non-techy there will be limits to what you can achieve.

I’ve acknowledged that, while convenient, my (small) setup is still a burden that I would be asking someone to take. If your friends don’t already share your passion or knowledge for Linux/Docker/the intricacies of <whatever you may be running>, I doubt they’d be willing to take on what you leave them.

My friends had a family member who had a giant setup of Raspberry Pi’s that did Pi-hole, Home Assistant, F@H, among many other services and machines (there were like 6 Pi s!). They passed some time ago, and there’s just no one in the family who was willing to take on the responsibility to learn how to manage everything that was going on—services have been slowly degrading/going down since then.

Those who rely on your services will just go back to using Google Drive, watch-anime-free.org.ru, and pressing “Open LAN world” in the Minecraft client. I don’t think it’s okay, but if you’re out of the game, you won’t be there to object.

That is to say, if you DO have friends that are knowing and willing, you need to leave plenty of good documentation. I haven’t been one to write much of anything, and I’ve already fucked up my shell profiles again because of no documentation, but I can give some general pointers:

• What runs where?
• Why are things configured in certain ways? (ie “$GameServer gets 4gb because going over creates GC stutters”, “$IP is blocked because of telemetry”, “$File is symlinked to /dev/null to effectively delete/override a rule from $SomewhereElse”)
• List rules and their exceptions. (ie “Service ports are numbered this way because it looks nice”, “Except $Port because it conflicts with $SystemService”)
• List things even if they’re from personal preference (ie “Service ports are numbered this way because it looks nice”, tells user that these are effectively meaningless and things shouldn’t break by changing these, barring common sense)

Basically, leave meaningful comments that explain why something is the way that it is. You should be able to use this documentation yourself as reference material. Keep this documentation updated regularly, as frequently quoted “bad documentation is worse than no documentation” (or something like that)

(sorry if this last section in particular doesn’t make much sense, I haven’t slept in $hours. feel free to ask for clarification!)

When I die my friends will miss me like usual. Then the Plex server will go down and they’ll miss me all over again.

My wife and I share a KeePass database for all of our credentials, including the keys to our digital kingdom. I document our LAN design, server setup, and general maintenance notes, which are synced between all of our devices via SyncThing.

I add notes and quick instructions to the important credentials, like “See Proxmox.md to start this service”, or “This password decrypts our file server drive…to do this, open a terminal and paste the following…”

She is comfortable pasting commands into a terminal already, so if anything ever happens to me I am confident she or my son will at least be able to access our data and move it to a more user-friendly format.

Edit: Had way too many words lol

Another consideration would be building communities around platforms and instances. That’s how many of the open source world thrives!