Marking Your Cyber Territory?

NoOnesMessiah asks: "I recently finished a relatively major webmail install for a large company and it all went very, very well. I left a '/.cornerstone' file for posterity (with names, dates the disks started spinning, 'asbuilt' notes for apache, php, etc) so that future generations would know who to blame (or call) in 3 to 5 years. I have also done this in various and sundry places within my network infrastructure while I wore the mantel of Senior Systems Engineer and even in bits of a major mp3 player's website while it was growing up on our network. Hell, even the concept of the 'asbuilt' is more than 14 years old to me. How was PHP built? Look at the "asbuilt" file for configure or compile-time options... This got me to wondering; How do Slashdot readers mark their territory so future generations know they were there? Certainly I'm not the only one who does this. I would think that most people do, even in some small way. Do you mark your own personal mailer, web server or desktops in the same fashion as you might for your employers or clients?"

Comments

A "docs" site

[djmitche]

Personally, I'm really the only hardcore UNIX person at my present employer. I anticipate that at some point I'll get hit by a bus or something, so I make notes on just about everything I do on a specially designed, password-protected web page. All of the data is in a format that's easy to read if, for example, Apache is broken.

I have directories for HOWOTOs, package install documentation, projects, standards & conventions, and official policies. Although most of the documentation up there is mine, I'm working on getting the rest of the admin team to use the site, too. It has already proven very helpful as an adjunct to my own memory, and as a source of "RTFM" URLs when others ask the same question over and over :-)

Documenting stuff

[menscher]

I do a combination of things:

• Whenever I modify a system file, say /etc/ntp.conf, I leave a copy of the original as /etc/ntp.conf.orig. This allows people to trace what's been changed.
• Build trees are always left in /usr/local/src, sometimes with explanatory notes.
• Updates/changes to the system that users might notice are logged in /var/adm/ChangeLog.
• The base system comes from an install script, which is available to admins. I also have been known to generate a .ps file documenting the system. (This came from a perl script that generated a TeX file.)
• Modifications to code always include my last name so they're easy to find.
• I'm currently learning troff so I can write manpages documenting the local system.

Anyway, mostly standard stuff. The hard part is documenting the documentation. It's amazing how much documentation I have, that nobody would ever find!