[c-nsp] OT: Network documentation tool

[A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk]

Hi,

> I'm looking for the perfect documentation tool for network

the obvious answer is the one that works for you and
your organisation. you say you've got a CIFS share right
now - but, used correctly, that might be the best way.
certainly easy to backup ;-)

we used some basic WIKI - qwikiwiki and then moved onto Drupal
which is currently in place. whilst good at providing content
it still suffers the curse of any written stuff (elec or print)
and that is that the network can quite easily make the docs look 
outdated - I would be very careful about what gets documented
and detailed - something like configs are (or should be!) already
being stored in usually a much better way - eg RANCID or another
RCS/SVN repository.  when things go wrong you dont want
to be digging through docs and a changelog system to try to map what
is and what was - you want to query your configs for anything
changed in the last eg 3 hours - thats what a proper config
store can tell you.  the docs should be higher level like
how the system is architectured...why you have what options
on VLANs and links etc.  thats my $0.01

(we also try to self-document as much as we can in places -
eg config files for DHCP and DNS can be veyr verbose...likewise
ACLs on routers/switches - use those remark commands! :-)

alan