On Mar 2, 2010, at 10:00 PM, Meenoo Shivdasani wrote: >> But what about keeping up with documentation as tasks are accomplished, >> new systems are stood up, etc? What tips do folks have for getting >> better at documenting in their daily tasks? > <snip> > I have individual pages for every system and each system has > links to pages for each application or service that's been configured > for the system.
I have to say: after working w/ a config mgmt. system, this kind of thing goes away. I don't have to keep track of what I did on each system. I also know that I can rebuild any of them from scratch, in $SMALL_#_MIN, from a bare metal build. The config mgmt. "code" also serves as a decent set of documentation as to exactly what went into a machine. It's not documentation for a new person, but it means that you can come back to it and read it a year later, and understand it. It doesn't have the context, but if you put comments in, it will help also. It's your basic procedural documentation. The rest of the team can also read it, and see what happened, and even modify it for the next time around. You do have to be diligent and actually use it, vs doing one-off systems by hand. And even when you do something by hand the first time, you have to make sure that it gets into the system. Of course... those one off systems have a bad tendency to become 2, then 3, then 4 off's. Matthew ------------------ Matthew Barr :[email protected] c:646.727.0535 aim: matthewbarr1 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
