Text template or tool for documentation of computer configurations

Posted by mjustin on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mjustin
Published on 2011-03-17T06:07:09Z Indexed on 2011/03/17 8:12 UTC
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I regularly write and update technical documentation which will be used to set up a new virtual machine, or to have a lookup for system dependencies in networks with around 20-50 (server-side) computers. At the moment I use OpenOffice Writer with text tables, and create one document per intranet domain.

To improve this documentation, I would like to collect some examples to identify areas where my documents can be improved, regarding general structure and content, to make it easy to read and use not only for me but also for technical staff, helpdesk etc.

Are there simple text templates (for example for OpenOffice Writer) or tools (maybe database-driven) for structured documentation of a computer configuration?

Such a template / tool should provide required and optional configuration sections, like 'operating system', 'installed services', 'mapped network drives', 'scheduled tasks', 'remote servers', 'logon user account', 'firewall settings', 'hard disk size' ... It is not so much low-level hardware docs but more infrastructure / integration information in these documents (no BIOS settings, MAC addresses).

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