As I’ve written about previously, I currently maintain four servers that together support the many pieces of my online presence. There’s relatively little configuration overlap between each instance, so I wasn’t particularly interested in a solution like Capistrano, Chef, or Puppet. My need was for tracking iterations, not repeating setups, so I leveraged Git.
How?
In the root of each server, I initialize a Git repository and create a README.md. The readme contains pertinent details like the server’s IPs, provider, and hardware specifications. I also note the services running thereon and any TCP ports they’re bound to.