Keeping track of all this IT crap

[H. K. Bemis]

I originally posted this last night, but it never seemed to make it to
the list...
--
I've tackled this problem before.  I didn't find anything that seemed
complete enough to do what I needed.  This was in a medium (75 users in
a multi platform environment, including corp offices, remote users and
remote sites)

I looked around a bit, but in the end I decided to maintain an internal
wiki site (I like TWiki) with all the data in it.

I had mine setup something like this;

Every device had a topic in the wiki.  Computers, printer servers,
switches, printers, servers, copiers, everything I touched had a topic.
The topic would contain all the information about the device. I also
uploaded any manuals into the wiki so they were available to me.
Drivers too.  Also made it easy to maintain maintenance records.  I used
a form that added an entry on the devices topic.  It isn't the best
setup, but it worked well once I got everyone updating the wiki.

For the network ports, as in who was connected to what.  Each switch had
a topic with a table of port listing, with a link to the topic of the
device that was connected to it.  I used the editable tables plug in and
gave each of my helpers a login so I can see who changed what and when.
TWiki uses RCS as it's back end, so it was pretty easy to use a few
scripts to monitor all the changes with my email.  TWiki has this
feature built in, but I like more information then TWiki provided.

It was a lot of up front work, and it was even more work getting people
to simply "look it up in the Wiki".  Once up and running, it was great. 
Everything is within 3 to 5 clicks away.  Everything you want to know
about the device including manual and device history right there, with
who did what and when.

I also used Zabbix to monitor the whole place and all devices.  I was
able to update topics in the wiki with data from zabbix (stored in
mysql) using  scripts to update a topic in the wiki with the latest
information about the device's status.

~k

--
-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com>
Reply-To: tedroche at tedroche.com
To: Greater NH Linux User Group <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Subject: Re: Keeping track of all this IT crap
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:07:45 -0500

Ben Scott wrote:
>   I may have asked this here before, but if so, I seem to recall there
> wasn't a good answer at the time.  Or maybe I just forgot and can't
> find it in the archives.  Either way, worth asking again.
> 
>   Do people know of any good software to keep track of all this IT
> crap?  Users, computers (with make, model, serial, CPU, RAM, etc.),
> patch panels and their jacks, switches and their ports.  Most
> importantly, what is connected to what: User A has computer B plugged
> into jack C which is patched into port D of switch E.  Multiple times
> 100 users, two buildings, and eight switches, and damn things are
> confusing.
> 
>   I'm looking for FOSS so I can (1) be cheap and (2) extend it to do
> what it doesn't.
> 

Was just reading Time Management for SysAdmins 
(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/timemgmt/) today, and Limoncelli was 
recommending a wiki. It's not RT, you have RT for that. And it's not an 
asset-management, inventory system, there are things for that. It's a 
set of note pages where you can stick your favorite spreadsheet, network 
diagram, procedures to set up a new user, form for users to fill out for 
more disk space, freeform and tending towards chaos but for your care 
and feeding. A decent one doesn't make it too hard to set up tables 
where they are appropriate.

Worth considering. I've seen too many projects get bogged down in trying 
to read the manual for the silver-bullet-software package.
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