After you get something working, you find you might have missed a step in documenting how you got that working. You might have installed a package that you didn’t remember. Or maybe you set up a network connection. In my case, I find I have often brute-forced the SSH setup for later provisioning. Since this is done once, and then forgotten, often in the push to “just get work done” I have had to go back and redo this (again usually manually) when I get to a new machine.

To avoid this, I am documenting what I can do to get a new machine up and running in a state where SSH connections (and forwarding) can be reliably run. This process should be automatable, but at a minimum, it should be understood.