The vault, the wiki, and this documentation

Machine translation of the French original.

Three places, often confused, that serve different purposes. The question "Where should I write this?" can be answered in one sentence, but it's worth asking: knowledge stored in the wrong place is not lost, it's simply inaccessible when it's needed.

What each is

flowchart LR
    travail["Session de travail<br/>incident, décision, mesure"]

    subgraph vault["Vault Obsidian — la mémoire"]
        notes["≈ 5 100 notes<br/>incidents · decisions.md · faqs/"]
    end

    wiki["Wiki (Wiki.js)<br/>≈ 5 100 pages<br/>resynchronisé chaque nuit"]
    doc["Cette documentation<br/>25 pages<br/>écrite à la main"]

    travail -->|"en continu,<br/>pendant qu'on agit"| notes
    notes -->|"automatique<br/>miroir nocturne"| wiki
    notes -.->|"à la main,<br/>quand ça se stabilise"| doc

    wiki --> lire["Retrouver<br/>« que s'est-il passé ? »"]
    doc --> faire["Agir<br/>« comment je fais X ? »"]

The arrow towards the wiki is solid: it's automatic, and no one makes decisions. The arrow towards the documentation is dotted: it assumes someone who reads, rewrites, and decides what should be published.

The vault and the wiki have the same volume, and this is no coincidence: the wiki takes all the versioned notes from the vault, except those that a confidentiality filter excludes. What distinguishes them is not the content, but the use.

	Vault	Wiki	This documentation
Nature	Working memory	Consultable archive	User manual
Powered	Continuously, during action	Derived from the vault, nightly	Manually, when it stabilizes
Volume	≈ 5,100 notes	≈ 5,100 pages	25 pages
Read?	No	No	Yes
Time	Dated — "August 24th…"	Dated	Present — "This is how we do it"
You open it for	Writing	Finding	Doing

The clarifying test

The short answer

This documentation answers questions that can be asked before knowing the park. The wiki answers questions that assume you already know it.

The question	The place
"How do I publish a service?"	documentation
"Why did docs take 40 minutes to deploy on August 30th?"	wiki
"Where is the Compose file for the stack located?"	documentation
"What decisions were made regarding LightRAG?"	wiki
"What is the SSH port for vm-docker?"	documentation
"What went wrong during the Headscale migration?"	wiki

Useful corollary: Any page in this documentation that contains a date is likely a disguised wiki note. The dates are legitimate for describing a measurement ("recorded on 2026-08-27"), but never for storytelling.

And the approximately 1,700 FAQs

They remain in the vault, and therefore in the wiki. They don't belong here as they are — for a matter of principle, not volume.

A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is a dated and specific document: it arises from a particular incident, it reflects the investigation that took place, and it states "this is what we thought, this is what we measured, this is what was wrong." This account is valuable, and it's a wiki entry.

What makes this documentation worthwhile is the rule that the FAQ contains – without the investigation, and presented in a way that someone who needs it can easily find it.

In the vault (FAQ)Ici (règle)

« Une émission acme.sh échoue Timed out waiting for DNS parce qu'AdGuard bloque le résolveur DoH » — 90 lignes : le symptôme, les fausses pistes, les trois pièges enchaînés, ce qui a été essayé, la date.

Un encadré de dix lignes dans Publier un nouveau service, à l'étape du certificat : --dnssleep est obligatoire, voici la commande qui tranche, voici le correctif durable.

La règle opératoire

Une FAQ consultée deux fois est une page de documentation qui manque.

Not "a FAQ to copy here": a rule to extract and apply within the relevant page.

Why both are private

Both are behind Authentik, and this is deliberate.

The value of this documentation comes precisely from what makes it unpublishable: the exact addresses, ports, paths, and the fact that the edge is the NAS. A stripped-down version of all this would no longer be a user manual — just generic text, that no one here would have a reason to read.

The truly publishable material exists, but it's not a third site

Some truths discovered here contain no addresses and apply to anyone:

• acme.sh exits with code 0 when the certificate installation fails;
• a act_runner has a unique scope, and executions queued do not appear to be errors;
• a DNS anti-circumvention filter can block the tool that issues the certificates from the home;
• a documentation theme can stop displaying its diagrams without writing a single error line.

This is material for an article, not another site to maintain. The common thread of these four deserves to be written down once and for all: they are failures that don't announce themselves.

In summary

1. We write in the vault while working — always, without hesitation.
2. The wiki updates itself. Nothing to do.
3. We promote here what has stabilized and will help someone to act — by rewriting, never by copying.

Dernière vérification de cette page : 2026-10-06