Our system documentation sucks, but I've tried a lot of things. We're all lazy, so we try to be as author-friendly and automated as possible.
I'm trying to get people (including myself, the hardest to convince) to use a wiki. The template is designed to balance author-friendliness and accessibility for people outside our group. For documenting current system configurations, it's hard to beat what the system itself can tell you. All our Linux boxes run a slightly modified version of RedHat's sysreport package to collect vital statistics and configs into /var/local/doc/`hostname` daily, and the contents of that directory on each system are then dumped to a central repository on a NetApp. This ensures that we have up-to-date and historical data on disk partitioning, baselines for things like uptime, df, ifconfig and ps, and Linux-specific goodies like /proc/scsi. System-specific HowTos may also be dumped in /var/local/doc/`hostname`. The authoritative copy is on the local system so you don't have to hunt elsewhere while single-user. Copying to a NetApp is handy for offline browsing/multisystem grepping and allows us to use snapshots to diff system changes over time. For our more restricted systems, I syslog bash command history to a remote host so that I can confirm I'm to blame when something goes wrong. http://www.notatla.demon.co.uk/SOFTWARE/honeypot_code_description.html We also have some loosely categorized HowTos in Arts, http://arts.sourceforge.net/ We also have some stuff in an extremely crufty home-grown FileMaker trouble ticket system. We also have some (NT) stuff in an Access database. We also have some stuff on a public tech support bboard. We also have some people who want to spend a lot of money on a commercial issue tracking system. We also have some people who want to use RT because the commercial issue tracking system was chosen for feature bloat, not usability, and only has a proprietary Win32 interface. -- Rich Graves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> UNet Systems Administrator --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
