cheat-sheets: a sysadmin's notebook published as it grows

A notebook, published because it might be useful

The repository description is the whole pitch: code snippets and notes that I have created over the years and which I make available to the public.

The readme gives the origin story in a few sentences. Over the years the author created a lot of scripts and notes, handwritten and digital, and at some point the question arose why not share it with the world. That is a more honest framing than a project page, and it tells you what kind of artefact you are looking at before you open a single file.

The content list is short.

- code snippets
- ansible playbooks
- notes to lookup networking solutions
- notes around Proxmox
- notes around OpenWrt

So there are two kinds of content here, and they are of quite different value. The notes are reference material on networking, on the Proxmox hypervisor and on OpenWrt, and the snippets and Ansible playbooks are working code for the same kind of infrastructure. The topics attached to the repository match: ansible, docker, ipv6, networking, openwrt and proxmox.

The primary language recorded for the repository is HTML, which fits a collection that is mostly prose and configuration, and the licence is MIT.

The directory list is the map of the collection

The top level of the repository is the only index there is, and it reads like a hardware rack of someone's working environment.

There is a Certificates directory, a Code Snippets directory, a Docker directory, a NAS directory, an OpenWrt directory and a Proxmox directory, then Web Servers, ansible, generic, networking and templates.

Two things are worth noticing about that list. The first is that it spans a small business or homelab, from certificates and NAS through virtualisation to routers, which means the notes are written from the point of view of someone who has to make these things work together rather than from a documentation team's point of view. The second is the mixture of naming styles, with capitalised names for some directories and lower case for others, which is the fingerprint of a collection that grew by adding a folder at a time rather than by design.

The generic and templates directories are the two that suggest reuse. Templates in particular implies a starting point to copy rather than a script to run, and generic is where the one-off snippets that do not belong to a named product end up.

For a reader, the fastest way in is to pick the directory matching the problem in front of you. The repository does not index by task, so finding the right note means knowing which of the eleven folders it landed in.

Work in progress, by the author's own description

There is a section headed this is work in progress, and it is worth reading before you copy anything.

As of July 2022, many of these folders may be empty still. The author explains that they are constantly working on collecting the data and will push as soon as something compelling is added, and that some of the snippets might be duplicates in their other GitHub repositories.

Two of those admissions matter in practice. The first is that empty folders are expected, so a directory that looks promising from the listing may contain nothing, and the file count badge in the header is the only quick signal of how much is actually there. The second is that content is duplicated elsewhere, so a reader looking for the canonical version of a snippet may find two copies with different states, and there is no index telling you which is which.

The date in that paragraph is also the point at which to calibrate expectations. The last push to the repository was on 2026-04-13, and the warning about empty folders was written in July 2022, so the project is not dormant, but the author's own caveat is four years old and the collection is uneven by nature.

The readme is explicit that it is work in progress, and that is a fair description of a personal notebook at any point in its life.

The as-is warning, and what it means for scripts

There is a section headed use at your own risk, and the wording is unusually direct.

Chaps, products change, and I am only human, there might be errors in the scripts, the infos may be outdated. The author says he is providing the information here as-is, for free, but use at your own risk.

For prose notes that caveat is almost conventional. For scripts it is not, and the two need to be read differently. A note about a Proxmox command that has since changed a flag is a small loss. A shell script that assembles a NAS configuration or manipulates certificates can destroy the thing it describes if the software it assumes has moved on, and there is no test suite, no CI and no versioning in the repository to catch that.

The repository carries a MIT licence, so the legal side is simple. You may use, copy, modify and redistribute the content, including commercially, with the notice kept. That is not legal advice, and it says nothing about whether a particular script still works on the version you are running.

The practical rule that follows is worth stating plainly. Treat the notes as a source of things to try, and treat the scripts as something to read line by line before running, particularly anything under a directory that implies it changes system state.

The contribution path is the same as the code path. The readme asks for a pull request on GitHub, or a message on the author's Discord server, and it closes with a single word: enjoy.

What this is compared with maintained documentation

The obvious comparison is with a documentation site for the products covered here, and the difference in kind is instructive.

A maintained documentation site is versioned against a release. It is written by people who work on the product, it is reviewed, and when a flag changes, the page changes with the release notes. A personal notebook has none of those properties. It is a record of one person's understanding at a point in time, and it is valuable precisely because it is not the vendor's story. It tells you how the problem got solved in one real environment, which is a different and often more useful thing.

The other comparison is with a packaged tool. This repository has no package, no installer and no release history, so there is nothing to depend on and nothing to upgrade. The consumption model is copy and paste, or read and write your own. That model has a virtue, which is that the content survives the author moving on, and a weakness, which is that nobody reviews it.

The repository structure reflects the copy and paste model. There is no build configuration, no test directory, no continuous integration and no documentation site to generate. The files are the artefacts.

So the honest comparison is not with a documentation site but with a well kept personal notes file, published. That is a real and under rated kind of open source contribution, and the topics in the repository, IPv6, OpenWrt, Proxmox, Ansible and Docker, are the areas where a working example from a real environment is genuinely hard to find.

Where the collection is the wrong tool

Four limits, and they are the ordinary limits of an unofficial reference collection.

The first is freshness, and the author says it outright. A script written against a version of OpenWrt, Proxmox or a NAS operating system that has since changed its command line will fail in confusing ways, and nothing in the repository will tell you which version a given file was written for.

The second is that there is no way to tell working notes from experiments. The readme describes the collection as snippets and notes created over the years, with no status markers, no dates on individual files and no indication of which ones are still exercised by the author. A snippet that has sat in a folder for six years may be an answer to a problem the author solved once, or it may be the script they use every week. You cannot tell from the repository.

The third is duplication. The readme admits that some snippets may be duplicates in other repositories of the same author, which means fixes, if they happen, may land in one copy and not the other, and anyone who vendored a copy has no way to know that an upstream version changed.

The fourth is scope. The collection covers a working environment, not a product. If you need a supported, tested, versioned answer to a networking or virtualisation question, a vendor manual or a project with maintainers will serve you better than a folder of notes, and the value here is the specific detail that the vendor manual does not have.

Maintenance, licensing and what the state of the repository says

The state of the repository is easy to read from the metadata, and it is the most important thing to know before you rely on it.

The last push was on 2026-04-13, so the collection is not frozen, but it is also not being worked on in a way that produces releases. The repository publishes no GitHub releases, there is no changelog, and there is no version marker on any of the content. The project is not archived.

So the maintenance story is that it is a personal repository that receives occasional updates when the author is in the area, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for it to be, and it is not something to build a deployment on.

The licence is MIT, and the badge row in the readme shows a licence badge alongside the language, last commit, file count, star and fork badges. That header is an unusual amount of decoration for a notes repository, and it hints at the author's intent, which is reach and contribution rather than distribution as a package.

The last line of the readme is a single word, enjoy, and that is a fair summary of the project's contract with the reader. Take what is useful, check it, and remember that the person who wrote it said so himself.

Editorial conclusion

cheat-sheets is a good source of raw material for a sysadmin who recognises the same problems, and it is worth bookmarking for the OpenWrt, Proxmox and networking notes rather than for the scripts. It is the wrong dependency for anything automated, since there is no package, no version and no test suite to rely on, and the author says plainly that the content may be out of date. Before copying anything, check the age of the file you are about to use, verify the commands against the current release of the software in question, and prefer the upstream documentation for anything that has to keep working.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. onemarcfifty/cheat-sheets on GitHub
4. README