One of My Uses for Twiki

I think Twiki is one of the best sysadmin tools out there. I've been using it in my day to day work for a few years now.

One of my favorite uses is for a Service Journal. This is part of my light weight change management strategy. Each one of my servers gets its own page. I record vital information about the server (serial number, OS, hardware, etc), changes to the system, issues the system experiences and anything else that may possibly be useful.

I'll use a TemplateTopic to create those pages. My layout is something like:


---+ Information

---++ Table of Contents

%TOC%

---++ System Information

|*Hostname*| _server name_|
|*CPU*| Xeon 5110 |
|*Memory*| 2GB |
|*Vendor*| HP |
|*Serial Number*| 123abc |

Of course, put whatever you need in here, like drive configuration, OS, installation date, etc.

---++ Warranty Information

---++ Installation Notes

---++ Work Log


Using Edit Tables make the table easy to update.
The worklog section on the wiki page to keep track of changes and issues. I use a format like:


* 18 Sep 2007 - [[SjServerName#SepHdFailure][Server Name - hard drive failure]]

#SepHdFailure
---++ 18 Sep 2007 - hard drive failure

At 10:15AM, Nagios sent a page saying sdc had failed. I grabbed a spare drive and replaced it at about 10:30. The rebuild process finished at 11:15.

-- Main.GaryRichardson - 18 Sep 2007


I'll also create these for configuration changes.

It's a really straight forward format:

1. Using the Event Syntax for the date, you can get the events recorded in a calendar
2. Linking to an #Anchor allows for linking -- the event that shows up in the calendar will automatically jump to the right spot on the page
3. Each event gets it's own section in the wiki page. There's plenty of room to paste in (using verbatim tags) the output of commands and log files. You can add in procedures that were followed and screen shots if you like.
   

Each servers page will be named something like SjHostName. It's easy to create a dynamic list of servers using FormatedSearch. For example:



%SEARCH{ "^Sj.+" scope="topic" nosearch="on" nototal="on" regex="on" }%


You can do even more advanced stuff using the header and format lines -- I have tables that include OS, CPU, Vendor and Location for easy sorting.