Documentation Killed the IT Guy
2 10 2007Ask any IT Guy, any real IT Guy what he hates the most and he will undoubtedly list documentation. Documentation isn’t fun for anybody, when you think about it you are
retracing everything you’ve already done and nobody likes to re-do things. You may not realize it but it’s something your employer also expects you to do. IT Guys tend to switch jobs more often than most employees and they want records of things when you leave. There are some ways to make documentation easier of course.
- Decide whether you are going to add to existing documentation or start clean and create a whole new set of documentation
- If you’ve already documented everything in the past year or two, just add to it.
- If your documentation is a little lacking or you’ve never documented the network get started!
- The first task at hand is to do a little house cleaning. I don’t mean fire your staff and hire an outsourced company in India. I mean clean up your mess, you know the cabling closet that looks like the one in the picture. It’s not going to do anybody any good if you label and document everything, if it takes a blood hound to find the cable or server you are looking for.
- Start with the physical. Label all your servers, switches, routers, firewalls, cabling, ups, etc. Just because you know where something is doesn’t mean your replacement will when you get hit by a bus.
- Once everything is neat and labeled, spend some time thinking about how you want to make a topology of everything. It’s wise to include a physical layout and a working diagram. I like Microsoft Visio for these diagrams. It is easy to work with and you can get icons for your network hardware right from the vendor in most cases. When you make your diagrams it’s helpful to start by making each location one by one and then combining them later to make a giant collage you can impress your co-workers with.
- Once you’ve got a nice map to go off of, start making detailed information pages for each device on your network. The best way to do this is to include an actual digital photo of the device and then list it’s roles and any special information somebody may need to work with it. This is where you’ll want to get router and switch configs printed out, etc.
- The last step is to make at least two books out of it. One you can keep in your office and the other should be kept off site, a digital copy off-site wouldn’t hurt either. When you are all done, look over your book and pretend you just started the job yesterday. Is there is enough info in your book to help you get acclimated on all the equipment and understand the layout of things? If there is, Great! Time to look at this and go demand a raise!
Great article! And wonderful site - keep up the great work. You have friends over @ AskTheAdmin.com.
No one likes doing documentation but if you make it as painless as possible it can be tolerable to the point where the hassle of doing it is worth it for your own benefit of using the doc. For the physical stuff make it easy… put a label maker near your servers. It shouldn’t be a chore to go find a label and come back later. For written docs, set up a wiki. A wiki is easy to use and easy to modify at any time. That way you can make corrections and changes to doc when you notice them instead of having to make a point to go back and “fix the doc”.
You certainly could print your doc but I prefer to keep it in electronic form. I’ve got so much doc for so many servers and services that changes often enough that printing is going to be out of date pretty fast. We use mediawiki but I dump a static html copy of it every night.