[c-nsp] OT: Network documentation tool

[Peter Rathlev]

Thanks to all who replied. I think we're going further with trying out
Mediawiki. The most important thing is of course that the written
documentation is up to date as much as possible. Easy editing is
paramount to achieving this.

Regards,
Peter

On Wed, 2009-07-22 at 18:02 -0400, jp wrote:
> We use Mediawiki. It's easy to customize if you don't like the left 
> frame. I like the easy editing of wikis, searching, history management, 
> web based access, etc... With the prevalence of wikipedia and lots of 
> software projects adopting wikis for documentation, most technical 
> people should not consider them difficult.
> 
> Lists of sites, important information about the sites, (local contact 
> info, power outage reporting info, alarm codes, combo lock codes, and so 
> on). We've also been known to write down when things were installed or 
> upgraded for warranty or maintenance purposes.
> 
> We also have written instructions for various procedures for different 
> parts of the organization, so if someone goes on vacation or gets hit by 
> a bus, other people can fill in. 
> 
> We also have a gallery. (using gallery 1.6 or jallery), so we can have 
> photos of the sites. It is good for guiding someone over the phone who 
> is onsite and you are not familiar with what they are looking at. We 
> also use it to verify line of site for wireless things with rooftop or 
> towertop panoramas from each site.
> 
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 05:25:53PM +0200, Peter Rathlev wrote:
> > Kind of OT, but hopefully someone has an opinion anyway. :-)
> > 
> > I'm looking for the perfect documentation tool for network
> > documentation. We already have tools to map out the network and lots of
> > management tools, but what I'm looking for is something like a
> > repository to store and update all the written documentation, like
> > procedures and so on.
> > 
> > We've been looking at different Wikis, among others the Mediawiki suite,
> > and it looks promising but in my eyes seem a little much when we could
> > cope with somthing much simpler. We've also looked at document
> > repositories like Owl. We've even looked at Sharepoint. None of these
> > tools seem to be just right though.
> > 
> > What do people use to store documentation? Currently we use a CIFS share
> > but this seems clumsy at best.
> > 
> > Any input is appreciated. :-)
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Peter