[aareet]

I’ve actually found that this is not the case and that while the learning is enjoyable, it’s very difficult to retain, especially if the result is a low maintenance server. A decade after I set it up, I will most certainly have forgotten how I set it up in the first place (speaking from experience).

[navigate8310]

This is generally true. Patiently documenting steps as well as logging any corrective and preventive actions (something that I learnt when studying for ISO 9001) is prudent.

[groestl]

I (mostly) stopped documenting in prose and used ansible instead. It's a bit more work, but it paid off numerous times since then. The prose that's still left, because it's really really to cumbersome to implement, is left in the comments of ansible files.