On 06/15/2010 09:39 PM, Damion Alexander wrote: > Greetings, > > I've been tasked with writing documentation on all of the systems/hardware I > supported so that the remaining admins can support them after I leave. The > problem I face is determining what information is important enough to > document outside of RTFM. I directly supported about 90 out of the 125 > servers, and all of the non-network services hardware so there isn't time to > document absolutely every detail. > > The really oddball things I've encountered over time has already been > documented. Such as "ignore this error message". However everything else is > already documented by the vendor, either in manuals or the support sites. > > If you were in this situation, on either side, what would you expect in that > in-house documentation? > > Damion > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lopsa.org > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > Damion, are you using puppet? If so, I recommend you do your docs inside the manifests and use puppetdoc to generate an up-to-date set of docs every night. Writing docs by hand at a volume of ~100 servers is not something most people will want to keep up to date.
If you're not using puppet- I still recommend trying to automate doc generation somehow. Possibly through a Nagios DB out to a set of wiki pages? It all depends on your setup. Are you leaving in short order? To more directly answer the question, what I would expect is: * List of files changed from base/default install * DR plan * Hardware quirks * Service tags/Warranty/Support Info * Common Operations, possibly with a script attached for the longer common ops -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
