EOL DR / End-of-life Disaster Response

Back in 2012, I moved to Belgium with my wife and started working with a bunch of techies who eventually became life-long friends.

Our VDI guy, Andy, was one of my favorites. He was grumpy, always tucked his shirt in, kept his desk Type A clean and was just so principled. He was into VMware VDI and I supported the SQL Servers in his Horizon environment.

Even after Andy and I both left Belgium, we stayed in touch, sharing stories of our current employment and talking about the current state of our setup. He still got to use PowerShell at work and I did too.

I always thought he'd be there and was devastated when I found out he died unexpectedly.

What about his homelab?

"What about his homelab?" I thought. "Will his wife's wifi devices even be able to get an IP address if his DHCP server goes down?". I reached out to her to see how she was doing and she told me that, six months on, she avoids his office at all costs. She worries what will happen when her TV no longer works, when her wifi no longer works. She knows people will help, but the idea of calling them is torturous. Heartbreaking.

Immediately after reading her email, I reached out to my and Andy's former colleagues who lived near her and they offered to drop by to help her figure out both the short-term and long-term tech plans. I asked Andy's widow for her email and phone number so she wouldn't have to dread calling, someone else would place that call for her.

That got us all thinking -- what would Andy have wanted for his homelab? What would our own spouses do if we suddenly weren't there? Who would close our Azure accounts? Who should get the PureStorage array? For those of us who are The Bill Payers, how would our spouses know which bill is paid by what bank account?

I put together an initial draft to answer these questions for my own wife, and then crowdsourced the rest. So many of my tech friends suggested stuff I hadn't thought of and I'm sure there's more. Initially, I was going to make it a gist, but a friend suggested putting it on GitHub which would make PRs possible.

checklist.md -> checklist.docx

Within hours of this interaction, I created a Word document, printed it out, filled in a couple passwords manually, and then stored it in a fire proof bag.

Here is a sanitized list that you can use for your own purposes. If anything is missing or you have suggestions, please feel free to submit a PR. Upon approval, the Word doc will be regenerated for others.

So here is the checklist:

In markdown format: checklist.md
In docx format, generated by the GitHub Action: checklist.docx

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