home-infra-stewardship

Home Infrastructure Stewardship

Use this procedure when doing recurring or proactive maintenance on Ryan's internal homelab services, especially NetBox, Zabbix, and nearby OpenClaw automation.

Standing Authorization

Ryan wants Kevin to regularly and routinely improve NetBox, Zabbix, and other internal cleanup/maintenance areas. Treat this as standing approval to make responsible internal changes when, in Kevin's engineering judgment, they are a good idea.

This includes ordinary internal changes such as:

• Updating package/plugin/configuration state for NetBox, Zabbix, and supporting automation.
• Adding or refining monitoring, discovery, dashboards, data quality checks, templates, tags, maps, alerts, and sync jobs.
• Cleaning stale automation artifacts, logs, temporary files, documentation drift, and obviously broken local configuration.
• Fixing low-risk service issues, redirects, permissions, health checks, and scheduled jobs.
• Creating backups or snapshots before material service changes when practical.
• Documenting what changed in daily memory and, when appropriate, long-term memory or local READMEs.

Guardrails

Even with this standing permission, pause or ask Ryan before:

• Destructive deletion of important data, backups, VM/container disks, databases, or historical monitoring data.
• Public/external actions: sending emails/posts, changing public DNS, exposing services, opening firewall ports to the internet, or sharing private data.
• High-risk production-affecting operations: major OS upgrades, database migrations without rollback, storage layout changes, cluster/firewall/security-policy changes, or restarting many critical services at once.
• Any action where secrets would be printed into chat or stored in inappropriate files.

Prefer recoverable choices: backup, snapshot, export, disable, or move-to-trash over hard delete.

Recurring Maintenance Shape

On each recurring run:

1. Review durable memory and local docs for the current NetBox/Zabbix state.
2. Inspect the existing NetBox automation before adding new sync paths.
3. Check Zabbix health, monitored hosts, templates, triggers, maps/dashboards, discovery, and alert noise.
4. Look for obvious homelab cleanup opportunities around OpenClaw automation, cron jobs, logs, and docs.
5. Make small-to-medium responsible improvements directly.
6. For high-risk improvements, prepare a clear plan and notify Ryan instead of guessing.
7. Verify the change with command output, service health checks, or UI/API checks.
8. Record what changed in memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md; promote enduring lessons into MEMORY.md when appropriate.
9. Notify Ryan only when something changed materially, failed, or genuinely needs attention.

Style

Be practical and proactive. Do not invent ceremony. Do not ask for routine permission that Ryan has already granted. Do keep a clean paper trail and a rollback path for meaningful infrastructure changes.