[geeks] documenting the environment

[Nadine Miller]

Frank Van Damme wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> many of you are probably familiar with the topic of documentation. I
> mean the process of documenting a network of IT environment, including
> servers, routers/switches/firewalls, physical and virtual hardware, ip
> addresses and ranges being used, ports occupied on network hardware,
> SAN, physical locations etc.
> 
> There must be a dozen ways to do this, but I was wondering how people
> cope with this problem in real life , and if some methods turn out to
> work better than others. I am also dreaming of a method allowing me to
> track changes to the documentation as the environment changes/expands.

Good luck with that!  I've yet to work anywhere with decent 
documentation.  We had a lot of documentation at the .govvie places, 
unfortunately just in a shared folder on the exchange server.  But even 
this was incomplete in spite of government mandated controls on 
configuration changes.  Everywhere else was very, very lax.

The bigger the shop the harder it is to get people to document, IMO. 
You really have to get everyone behind it, and get management to put 
some investment into it to encourage people to keep it updated.

There are some scripts that can be used to collect info (say, run out of 
cron) and inject said info into a db.  Some of the network management 
softwares supposedly are self-documenting.

You might want to have a look at things for configuration management 
like CFEngine, Pikt, and similar.

=Nadine=