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?"

Comments

Similar Situation

[ResQuad]

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.

A non-Wiki post

[truthsearch]

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.

Here's what we use

[MagicMike]

We're a small consulting shop, and the guys that do the in-house IT are expected to be full-time billable.

Issue tracking JIRA (from Atlassian.com). Bugzilla could work though Documentation Confluence (also from Atlassian). Any Wiki could work. Communication Mailman - we have one operator mailing list, root mail all goes there and we have discussions there Config Control CVS - If you alter it from the stock install, it should be in CVS. Subversion would work. Use "activitymail" to send CVS commit messages with diffs to your operator mailing list. Now if a machine dies, you don't care Monitoring Nagios and MRTG - If I expect a computer to be providing a service, everything that I can obvserve about that service will be monitored so we can detect failures quickly and fix them, and see patterns over time. Nagios sends alerts to the operator mailing list. MRTG is used to see how bandwidth is trending. Updates Yum - we have our own yum repository, with our own packages in there. If I am using something on more than two servers, I package it up for easier maintenance VPN links PPP over SSH - nothing fancy, but it works. Backups rsync - we have a cascading backup where cron dumps data on a machine, then rsync carries it to a central machine, then that machine rsyncs over a VPN link to an off-site machine Secret storage GPG - we keep passwords in GPG-encrypted files. If you need them, I encrypt it with your public key, and you can see them. Authn/Authz LDAP - we use pam-ldap for access control everywhere, and mod_auth_ldap on the web stuff. It's not SSO, but it is single-password. That's key

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)