So I started out writing a bunch of little scriptlets to do the different parts of the documentation procedure.  When Mark saw what I was doing he suggested that we take this a step further by having one big script that does all the documentation and outputs it in wiki-markup that could go straight to confluence.  So we collaborated on building a big documentation script.  Then through work on another project to build a tool that would allow engineers to copy files to a customers server through the central midpoint server I realized we had the potential to push and pull this documentation with little effort.

Meanwhile Mark was working on a program that would allow an engineer to post a document to confluence from the command line.  With this program and the copy program the workflow was complete.  By building a wrapper script using some of the logic in the copy program I could push the documentation script up to a customers server then pull the output back, remove the litter files on the server then push the output document up to confluence all in one easy command.

Once things were working as intended it struck me that our initial attempt at the documentation script was not nearly detailed enough.  So I went back and rewrote the hardware section to use the Dell utilities or fall back on standard Unix utilities if the Dell software isn’t present.  Then I started to rework the J2EE application section.  So far the J2EE section has grown over ten fold in size and the documenting of Tomcat containers is almost finished.  There is much work to be done yet on getting better information for the other containers and applications within them.  After that will be a rework on the apache vhost documentation.

A sample screenshot of magic documentation