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How Do You Handle Your Enterprise Documentation?

Posted by Cliff on from the describing-your-infrastructure dept.

An anonymous reader wonders: "I'm curious as to what tools Slashdot readers use to inventory and document their networks? What got me thinking about this is the part VMWare has been taking in data centers. You've got your SAN, various physical and logical networks, various VMs, and so forth. It just adds a new layer of complexity in terms of documentation. I'm curious as to what people have been using as for doing things like documenting how their backups work, LAN settings, FW settings, where and what runs what services, and so forth. How do you blueprint your entire IT infrastructure so that someone brand new could start and figure out what does what?"

4 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Uhh, the usuals? by toleraen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Word+visio.

    Of course the person creating the drawings and documents must be proficient in technical writing (aka not an idiot), because no matter what tools you have, if you don't know how to explain things, they'll be useless. Try to get your documentation peer reviewed to make sure it makes sense.

  2. I'm loving DokuWiki by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki) is a great little wiki system and an absolute snap to get set up and rolling. I rather like its use of namespaces (logical subdivisions of content based:on:seperating:colons) and the ability to restrict specific user/group permissions based on namespace. This makes it fairly straightforward to set up a tiered access system, where senior techs can access more sensitive data that the tier 1 guys don't need to see.

    Mind you, it's not meant to be a content management system; when referencing documents, we just point it to a shared drive/folder on the network where the relevant related document is stored.

  3. Re:Media Wiki by Degrees · · Score: 2, Informative
    At least with older MediaWiki (ver. 1.4), it didn't search on IP addresses. That is to say, each octet of an IP address was too small for MySQL to index, so you couldn't search by IP address. If you knew you were looking for the Central Plant router, you were fine - but if you had 192.168.2.123 and wanted to find where that was used, you were s.o.l.

    Another deficiency is that MediaWiki doesn't support image map. Sometimes the best way to find info is to click on the picture....

    --
    "The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
  4. We use 80-20 document manager by gtoomey · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.80-20.com/products/document_records_man agement.asp Its very much enterprise level. The inane comments here make my wonder if any of you have a job at all.