Re: user management solution needed

[Kwan Lowe <kwan.lowe@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[snip]
> And yes, I document everything very well!   My motto is "If you aren't
> spending 5% to 10% of your time documenting what you do, then neither
> you nor your manager are doing their job"

These are words to live and die by :D

I also agree that good documentation is extremely valuable; however, I
would go one further and say that when building a system, good
documentation is only part of the battle.

I hate to inject any PHBisms on this hallowed list, but I think one
aspect of Six Sigma methodology is actually germaine to CentOS/RedHat.
In particular, kickstart installation helps to reduce and even
eliminate variation in the server buildout process.

The problem with relying on documentation, even great documentation,
is that it puts the responsibility on the admin to follow. Now we all
know of the bad admins that can't follow directions, but in my
experience, the culprit is often the good admin who knows another way
to do something or has done it so often that he/she skips a critical
but simple step or just is so busy that things get missed.  So given a
choice between great documentation and a good kickstart file, I'd
generally prefer the kickstart. In fact, given 100 builds, I would
prefer if they are all wrong in the identical way than have a perfect
build document that builds a perfect server but varies from instance
to instance.
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