Hello all. I have been dropped into an environment where we have inherited a large IT operation which contains little to no documentation on our server environment. The general feel of the system is that its about 80% linux, 20% windows. Over the next few weeks, I have a colleague that is to parse through this entire system via SSH, and attempt to figure out what the system does from the inside out.
Now there are a hundred ways to skin a cat on linux. But I am wondering if there are ways that some of you have dove into a linux system and dumped the guts of what it is actively doing. I am curious to know if there are some methods that may speed up the entirety of the process as I have well over 800 to traverse through (granted, this can be automated but id like to see where you all check w/certain commands).
What are some of your methods?
How would you go about documenting a server?
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Re: How would you go about documenting a server?
Well, there's always the old "Turn it off and see who complains about what" method.
But (slightly) more seriously, I'd look at what's enabled in 'service' or 'systemd' as the case may be, What's writing log files, what's on top in 'top;, and finally what's not a system process in 'ps -ef'.
But (slightly) more seriously, I'd look at what's enabled in 'service' or 'systemd' as the case may be, What's writing log files, what's on top in 'top;, and finally what's not a system process in 'ps -ef'.
Re: How would you go about documenting a server?
From my experience it's also a good idea to come up with a way of easily updating the documentation as new discoveries are made or changes implemented, perhaps a PHP or HTML system would be a good idea as you can easily update the documents. Unless you are going to be using some easily accessible Word/LibreOffice document, for evergreen documentation I like either HTML or static text files stored on a server for easy access/updating.
Good luck and keep us posted, I enjoy reading about these sort of projects
Good luck and keep us posted, I enjoy reading about these sort of projects
Re: How would you go about documenting a server?
I'm in the midst of migrating documentation for my cluster from various Open/Libre Office documents to Dokuwiki. It has the advantage that all storage is in ASCII text files, so backups and archiving are trivial. The basic Dokuwiki is in epel-6, I'm not sure of the epel-7 position. Plugins can be downloaded that enable you to generate standard format pages from forms - ideal for repetitive node documentation. All pages (including those so generated) can be edited through a GUI interface and there is provision for ACLs to determine who can read or edit what.