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Software for a One-Man IT Department?
skywalker107 asks: "I am a one man IT department for a small Company (~100 PCs 4 Servers). I know that the bigger companies use alot of admin tools for inventory, documentation and management. Right now all of my information is spread out over documents, spreadsheets, and diagrams. The software I have tried has been poor at best and only covers one of the areas I need. What do the other small IT departments use to bring this information together and help manage the madness? Is shareware/freeware a good route? Does the open source movement have anything to fit a small scale setting?"
I have a similar situation on my hands. Though I'm not given much of a budget. I either make (aka program) or use open source. I've found a great tool for documentation is a Wiki - especially if other people interact with it (but mainly cause its simple and has history). I use KeePass for passwords - also a great tool. As for asset tracking, I dont have a suggestion on cause I use my companies own product for that.
snowulf.com
Check out the HelpBox and AuditWizard offerings from Layton Technology.
Not free, but very affordable, and very knowledgable and helpful helpdesk staff. My company's using it, and I'm quite happy with it.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You're going to get 50 posts telling you to just use a wiki. That's decent for documentation but hardly the answer you need.
My suggestion is to try something like Plone. Set up document types for inventory and any specialized documentation you may need. You can set up simple workflows for processes if you want to get fancy (e.g. track computer order status). You can easily attach documents like spreadsheets as well.
I think you should look at one decent open source package you can customize a little (in Plone's case with no programming) which would encompass as much as you want to manage in one place.
Developers: We can use your help.
A trouble ticket system for users to request help is a must (e.g. Request Tracker).
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I'm currently interning at a company with a one-man IT department. When I arrived, their hardware/software inventory was spread over a half-dozen excel spreadsheets and (even worse) some pen-and-paper forms. I set up a server with the OCS Inventory tool and bam, it was as simple as adding a line to the network logon script -- now the hardware and software inventory of every computer is updated each time a user logs onto the network. It's absolutely the best inventory software I've ever encountered, and it's saved our IT guy a hell of a lot of time previously wasted on visiting each station to perform inventories.
I'm not sure what other information you want to 'manage,' but for hardware/software inventory, OCS takes the cake.
http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/
At the (small) company I work for, we have been using http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/service -desk/. It is a pretty nice tool, with some pieces that we will probably never use. I used to work for a couple really big companies that used really big (read: expensive) tools, and this one covers most of those bases pretty well. For small installs (25 pcs) you can use this one for free.
The combination of these things keeps everything in line. In particular, I'll point out that each part works together in such a way that there is only one place to check documentation (the wiki), one place to check for a work queue (the issue tracker) and one place to check for state information and discussion (the mailing list). That makes it easy to deal with, easy to delegate etc.
Also, you'll note that on a day-to-day basis, unless something breaks, there is no work required. That's huge. If the status quo requires any work at all, you'll eventually hit a scaling limit. The only thing that should require work is either a migration, an upgrade, or an expansion. And of those, upgrades should be easy to (nagios, yum and version control help there)
an interesting way for you to venture into software development inyour spare time. Find a niche and scratch it
...so I hope I can help. I use VNC for any troubleshooting with the users. In smaller shops, you have a chance to educate your users a little more. Therefore, I do simple things (like OMG my shared folder is not connected!) with them so they know how to fix things and do not bother me with the same things twice. Trouble tickets are handled by a little Access database I created to keep track of things. I handle an inventory of vending machine and I created another database for that. I use thunderbird and the calendar extension for my day-to-day tasks. If my boss asks me, I just refer to the calendar and ask if I should shift my obligations. I could also create a "To do" database and assign levels of importance based on need, but I dont got much time for that. I automated antivirus and patch distribution on the servers. I installed firefox to all the users. That way they dont mess with IE. I gotta go now, but if i think of more, I'll post again.
--MaxPowerDJ
All of these are open source, built on LAMP, and run great on Windows.
e ). The Anonymous Reporting Form is a time saver.
a in_Page). Mind maps are a FANTASTIC tool for documentation and you can publish them easily on a web server (get 0.8.1 beta3).
HW & SW inventory: Winventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net./
Trouble ticketing: Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net./ Graphs all parameters on your servers and routers.
Documentation: TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php). It has articles, FAQs and LDAP integration.
FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/M
These are free, and get the job done.
SysInternals's tools (http://www.sysinternals.com./ Process Explorer and TCPView are the most useful, and there are many other great utils.
KiXtart (http://www.kixtart.org./ The best language for login scripts, and just about all your scripting needs on Windows.
Network Notepad (http://www.networknotepad.com./ Draw your nework diagrams here, and then publish them on your web server.
Role
I work 60-70% of my time as a member of the core consulting team here and the rest of the time on "IT" administration and management around the local office. I should note though that I am a software engineer first and fore most, but it so happens that in small businesses one must wear many hats. Last year I was also heavily involved in accounting activities and managed a marketing program.
Scale
I only have 30 workstations and 27 servers (only 2 are publicly accessible and 8 are in a RCF) to worry about presently:
Culture
It should be noted that my users are technically very competent, which is a totally different can of worms to you (I assume from your comments), but there are plenty of issues to guard against with too competent a user as well!:) The issues are just different.
Environment
Server OS: RHEL 3
Workstation OS: Fedora Core 4 and 2 MacOS X (those damn graphic designers/marketing folk!:)
VPN Server OS: NetBSD 3 (runs on an Alpha box)
Software Tools
SCM: Subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/
Issue Tracking: Trac, which integrates nicely with Subversion http://edgewall.com/trac/
Internal Documentation (for future growth): Trac's built-in wiki http://edgewall.com/trac/
Web Server: Apache, mod_python, mod_ssl, mod_dav, and all that good stuff http://apache.org/
Knowledge Base: OpenCyc (but looking for something better that is still open source)
Intranet Framework: Python 2.4/TurboGears/Apache/mod_python http://python.org/ and http://turbogears.org/
Authentication: Fedora Directory Server (LDAP)
Updates: Yum, up2date
Server Monitoring: Nagios http://www.nagios.org/
[Internal] Remote Access: ssh and Gnome/VNC for the rare visual task
[External] Remote Access (i.e. VPN): OpenVPN
Internal Tools
Fixed Asset Management: Rolled my own TurboGears Web/AJAX application that hooks into our accounting system (it took 3 days part-time).
Backups: Rolled own Python backup mechanisms including scripts
Deployment Tools: Using Python's autoinst http://autoinst.tigris.org/
Continous Integration: I have started using Bitten instead of using cron and shell scripts to launch Python distribution builds and tests on a nightly and "continuous" basis for immediate feedback - something I find invaluable.
Office Software
As mentioned in a previous posting using a good calendaring tool is a very good idea. My recommendation is the Calendar extension for the Mozilla suite of tools.