The RageNET Weblog

One of the important things of maintaining a big network environment - with a small staff - is to keep up to date documentation on configurations, customizations, and instructions for frequently executed tasks. Commonly when I walk into a new company the documentation is terrible? Why? Because there is either no thought to maintaining documentation or the documentation system/procedure in place is too time consuming to use.

If a documentation system us hard to use it wont be used at all. It should take less effort to update a piece of documentation than to send an email. Locating a document should be as easy and should support freeform text searching. Thats why the best documentation setup I’ve worked with is a wiki. It’s easy to create, locate, and change documentation which encourages people to actually document things! You will have current verbose documentation when you need it.

If you do use a wiki to maintain your documentation produce an offline copy of periodically and burn it on cd. Put this CD along with one copy of every vendor supplied CD into a CD wallet and keep it at the datacenter. it will prove invaluable when you have outages.

Heres the wiki engine I’ve used - and liked - in the past. It runs on top of your vanilla LAMP stack.

tikiwiki.org — TikiWiki CMS/Groupware

This is an example of how not to behave if you are a small business on the internet. A friend of mine simply posted a question on a forum, the entirety of his question was: I’m curious if anybody knows anything about Lucas Environmental Stormwater Services, Inc.? This simple question has led to the owner threatening legal action in email and via rambling voice-mails. It is never a good idea to threaten someone unless they are blatantly in the wrong and doing something clearly illegal. Otherwise you just rile people up and turn what should have been nothing into a huge negative-publicity exercise for your company. For more information see: mhalligan: Greatest voicemail transcript EVER

Technorati Tags: lucas environmental services

Avvenu got them selves some very good press after releasing their music player app at CES. They showed up on Techcrunch which linked to the article Go2web2: Your own iTunes PC! They’ve even gotten themselves well Digged. Their application allows you to listen to the music on your PC from anywhere, on most any device. Works for most mobile devices and web browsers. The coolest feature though, is the ability to share your music with your friends! You can share a playlist and your friends can listen to it via a nifty little flash app.

They posted a funny little demo of the Alpha version of the product.

Technorati Tags: avvenu, itunes, mp3