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Questions tagged [documentation]

120 questions
27
votes
14 answers

If you got hit by a bus, would your company be in trouble?

At work, I'm the only IT guy (do it all, and do it now type guy) for the last 10 years. If I ever got hit by a bus they would be totally screwed. I've mentioned it several times to management/president type people, yet they ignore me. Too bad for…
user6848
23
votes
6 answers

Getting started with documentation

We haven't been doing any documentation at my workplace. I'm completely new to it and ask for some guidance getting started. I have a few questions: What are the essential documents that a sysadmin should write and maintain? And why are these so…
chickeninabiscuit
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16
votes
5 answers

How do I write man pages?

How do I write a man page? Where can I find a reference of all formatting codes? Are there any good tutorials on writing man pages? What is the most convenient way to write a man page? Should I enter it directly in a text editor? Are there WYSIWYG…
amarillion
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8
votes
1 answer

Are there standards/conventions used by IT technical writers?

TL:DR? Fine...here: Short of hiring or outsourcing to a Tech Writer, are there basic standards/conventions/practices that Technical Writers employ in their trade that can be learned from in order to create proper IT documentation and maintain that…
TheCleaner
  • 32,822
8
votes
3 answers

How do you avoid that server documentation gets out of sync with the actual setup?

We have have reasonably good documentation for our environment (in AsciiDoc format) which recently allowed another person to recreate the entire setup from scratch in less than 30 minutes. However, I noticed that after the initial setup, it easily…
Frerich Raabe
  • 791
8
votes
7 answers

What level of documentation do you expect to be provided to you by developers?

Title says it all really. It can sometimes end up that development and IT are at loggerheads over this sort of thing. What level of documentation do you expect when you're expected to install, patch, maintain, start, stop and diagnose a solution…
cletus
  • 10,099
6
votes
2 answers

Properly documenting installations of seldom used new technologies

I've been tasked with looking if a combination of NoSQL (in this case possibly Neo4J) and SQL-Server is a possible solution for a performance problem we've been having. Part of my technical analysis is the maintainability and stability of the…
Reaces
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6
votes
6 answers

New Sys Admin job...Where do I begin?

I'm looking for some general advice here. I've decided to take my first job in a lead sys admin position...I don't start until next month, but in the meantime I'd like to prepare for the position. For those of you that have walked into this role at…
Windows Ninja
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4
votes
4 answers

How to handle knowledge handover effectively?

Let's say a large enterprise opens a new office in (insert random location here) and want the new colleagues up to speed as fast as possible. Let's also say this enterprise is a very typical one with a complex environment, lots of history and almost…
Zizzencs
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2
votes
1 answer

How to safely document details of small IT assets?

I have a small set of assets including: Virtual machine host Multiple virtual machines Shared folders AWS services Backup software If I were to get "hit by a bus" the people left behind that would have to sort things out would be lost. I fear that…
Eric Snyder
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2
votes
4 answers

How to visually document IT processes?

Our company has 8 departments each housing approximately 12 people on average. I'm the CTO of the company and IT is involved in pretty much all departments. As such, there is a need to define and document all IT processes and also all the tech level…
tobefound
  • 233
2
votes
1 answer

Why should I join USENIX and SAGE?

I've recently discovered some documentation on sage.org website that would be of interest and great help to me. But in order to access to it I have to register with USENIX. Now since I'm from Europe and the organization is very US based I cant see a…
Redconnection
  • 297
1
vote
4 answers

Migrate existing documentation from word / excel to web

Backstory: We are looking at the posibility to migrate existing documentasion from a windows folder tree ( containing word and excel mostly) to a internal web site ( this is IT dokumentation, if the first go). Because this is internal use, i was…
EKS
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0
votes
2 answers

Get man page out of preformatted cat page

Is there a way to get the source out of the a preformatted man page? I need to parse the man page sources on different platforms and on one pc there are only cat pages, and I don't want to write 2 scripts for both situations. Greets, Oliver
Trollhorn
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0
votes
3 answers

What are suggestions for hardware,software,and active directory documentation?

There is a lot of total crap out there I don't want to waste a lot of time testing to be disappointed. I'm trying to create some physical documentation for software, hardware, active directory, group policy, etc. I'd like either something super…
Seth
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1
2