Re: [SAGE] Unix sys admin "run book" documentation standards and templates

["Guy B. Purcell" <guy@extragalactic.net>]

On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 11:31 PM, Bruce Hamilton wrote:

> My department, which has nearly 20 Unix sys admins running about as 
> many distinct administrative domains*, needs to put together some sort 
> of "run book" documentation so that any admin can come quickly up to 
> speed in any other admin's domain.

The first company I worked for used work instructions for detailing how 
things were done.  I liked 'em a lot; however, they got to be a bit of 
a pain for experienced admins, who'd sometimes gloss over steps because 
there were too details & the admins "already knew the procedure."

But since our WIs were in HTML, an idea was later hatched to give 'em 
depth, with the initial page for a particular task just outlining the 
procedure for the experiences admins, but containing links to detailed 
(to the point of having copy/paste-able steps!) instructions so that 
new admins would know exactly what to do.

The bonus of this is that any experienced admin can bang out some part 
of a WI in little time--just get the outline ready, or add the details 
page for step X in procedure Y.

--
Guy
(guy@extragalactic.net)

Sysadmin for hire <http://www.extragalactic.net/guy/resume.html>