ADR-0011: keep the wiki internal, put the emergency tier on paper - #156
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The Lemmiwinks wiki runs on Oracle at 10.0.99.30, behind the same firewall, switch and power as everything it documents. Three ordinary failures take the documentation out along with the thing it documents, and the audience makes that sharper than it would otherwise be: these pages are written for a non-technical household, for the case where I am unreachable. A recovery document that requires the estate to be healthy is a reference manual that has been mislabelled. ADR-0008 makes external exposure look like the obvious fix, since Caddy and step-ca are already on Winterfell and reusing them would be cheap. That is the option this ADR declines, and it is the one worth writing down. Publishing the wiki that way would make it depend on a reverse proxy and a CA that run in this house, on the same rack and the same power, so every failure that makes the docs unreachable today still would — plus two more components able to cause the same outage alone. An expired internal certificate is the obvious one: it fails quietly and looks like a browser problem to whoever is holding the phone. Also rejected: making the repo public, which buys convenience and publishes the addressing plan, rack order and the host holding the password manager; and a periodic offline export, which is the only option both family-readable and independent of the house, but decays without announcing it. A stale copy read with confidence during an emergency is worse than no copy. So: three tiers, each depending on strictly less than the one above. Paper for the emergency subset, the wiki for everything, GitHub for the technical second named on the card. The consequences section is where the cost is. Paper goes stale as silently as an export would — the difference is that its staleness is bounded by a deliberate annual drill, which makes that drill load-bearing rather than tidy. The rack's physical order is now part of a document that cannot be hot-fixed. And the GitHub grant presents as working right up until it matters, so it wants testing once. Refs Gerrrt/Lemmiwinks#3 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Records the decision behind Gerrrt/Lemmiwinks#3 and its companion PR Gerrrt/Lemmiwinks#23.
Why this is an ADR and not just wiki prose
ADR-0001 asks for one where "a reasonable person would ask why is it done that way?". ADR-0008 already put Caddy and step-ca on Winterfell, so publishing the wiki externally is cheap and looks obviously right. Declining it against that grain is exactly the decision that evaporates if it is not written down — and the next person to notice the wiki is unreachable will re-derive the same "just proxy it" conclusion.
The decision
The wiki runs on Oracle at
10.0.99.30, behind the same firewall, switch and power as everything it documents. pfSense down → no docs. Oracle down → no docs. Power cut → no docs.Three tiers instead, each depending on strictly less than the one above:
Rejected, and why
The cost, stated
Paper goes stale as silently as an export would. The difference is that its staleness is bounded by a deliberate annual drill and a
Last checkedline on the card — which makes that drill load-bearing rather than tidy. If it does not happen, this decision degrades to "the household has nothing."The rack's physical order is now part of a document that cannot be hot-fixed: the card says fifth box from the top, and someone will follow it after a reorder.
Also bumps the README tree comment from 10 to 11 ADRs.
Verified:
markdownlint-cli2clean across 33 files; no trailing whitespace, final newline present.🤖 Generated with Claude Code