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I've inherited "ownership" of various servers (the hardware itself and server software that runs on in - lots of Apache/Oracle/MySQL) with a wide variety of configurations. I'm a developer - I've been thrown into a Team Leader/Systems Support role for some very unfortunate reasons.

Do any of you guys in the SysAdmin world have any tricks/templates? So far, I've got an Excel spreadsheet with columns

HOST  IP   PORT  USE     POC 
----  --   ----  ---     ---
db1   x.x  1521  Oracle  Joe

Not rocket science, and what I've got will do the job once it's complete, but once it's got everything in there it's going to be pretty busy. There are probably ~ 30 hosts, but anywhere between 1-20 server apps on each machine.

My question essentially is "how do you guys do it"? Is there a magic Excel template I should adapt? Do you just use a Wiki and keep it udpated? Is this SysAdmin 101?

New to this.

1 Answers1

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Everyone has their own way of documenting things. First you need to make it so it is usable by you replacement. Second by you.

I don't like excel for server documentation, there is just too much information that you need to track to keep it sane. I do keep a seperate excel spreadsheet with the following info: * IP * Hostname * Owner * Function

Each subnet gets a separate tab.

I'm a big fan of writin documentation in <Advanced document editor of choice>. Personally I keep one monolithic Word document, using headings so that a ToC can be auto-generated. Wiki's also work well since you can break things down and have less clutter but still the same info. I personally don't like them because they are a PITA to keep updated in an offline form.

What I keep for each server:

  • Servername
  • Any historical server names
  • function
  • IP
  • Physical location
  • Hardware
  • OS
  • Installed Software
    • Configuration information (who,what,when,why,how)
  • Custom scripts - location and function
    • Simple scripts have a flow diagram built in
    • complex scripts have their own process documentation
  • Backup Information
Zypher
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