Server (location, MAC, IP) documentation with Google Docs

documentationipam

I work for a shop with 300+ physcial servers and about the same number of VM guests. We use Puppet heavily and are mostly Centos5.5 and about 20% Centos6.2.

We use Google docs for storing various things. We have a rack spreadsheet which has locations, names and switchports. We have an IP spreadsheet with all the subnets and static hosts.

The Google spreadsheets are basic but they work and they don't enforce a heavy process mindset. We've looked at a number of CMDB systems but they are heavy and seem to want to solve a bunch of large enterprise issues that we don't have.

My question:

How do I create a Google spreadsheet that has all of my hosts (hostname, location, MAC, IP, etc) as lines on a page and also create various views to the data.

FWIW, I just spent a couple hours reading about Google gadgets and it's clear I could build this but it seems like this is such a common problem that there must be something I can cargo-cult into a solution.

Best Answer

Is Google Docs a requirement?

I think it's a stretch to do this in a spreadsheet. I've certainly been in firms where IP's, network definitions and even rack elevation diagrams were represented in Google Docs Spreadsheets.

The process was a bit cumbersome and the eventual solution was to move to a purpose-built inventory-management system like Racktables. I see the recommendation for Open-AudIT as well...

In addition, this has been covered here: What software is available to keep track of hundreds of servers?

Servers

hardware specs
waranty information
network information
and of course installed software and configuration

Workflows

e.g. how-to add or delete a user and give him/her access to all relevant services

Important links

link to all your web interfaces
link to the monitoring URLs (nagios, munin, apc-monitoring...)
link to the wiki (for the printed version!)

Emergency instructions

what to do if intranet server/internet/web server/etc are down

Important:

Choose a wiki engine with easy export to PDF!
Its not useful if you are in holiday, the server running your wiki is down and no one knows what to do because your documentation is offline

Have a look at twiki, docuwiki or mediawiki.

BTW:

there is a OpenOffice.org plugin to write directly to mediawiki - very convenient.

EDIT:

Its also nice to write down some infos to /home/adminuser/maintenance. This is done quick and can be very helpfull, if several admins work on a server. eg:

2009-06-27 -thorsten-
          running aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade
          everything seems ok
2009-06-25 -andreas-
          cups-pdf wasn't reachable. restarted cups
2009-06-23 -thorsten-
          deleted old log under /var/log/squid
etc.

IT Documentation with MediaWiki

Unless there's going to be a lot of content switching tiers, I'd recommend separate wikis, as MW was never built for solid access control. Read http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_issues_with_authorization_extensions first and decide whether it's worth the effort. There's a lot of warnings and exploits that can circumvent the protection methods.

If you do go for it: have a look at the Namespace Lockdown extension. It lets you set group access control based on the namespace that the pages are in, then you can have one namespace for each tier. I have used this in the past (not sure how well it is supported on the current MW version, though). It works, but it's fiddly to configure and manage, especially if you've got lots of users.

If you go for two instances: You can certainly run more than one MW install on a single host, so long as you maintain good separation. Set them up as separate virtual hosts, with their own hostname, separate databases (and DB credentials) and you're away.

However, if you then want SSL, you'll need the generate a certificate for each (or use an internal wildcard one) and give each instance its own IP address as well as hostname.

The look+feel (skin) can easily be copied between the two instances, as it's just a PHP file with a subfolder. Get it how you like it on one, then copy it across and add it to your new config.