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Sys Admin Magazine > Archives > 2001 > June 2001

Automatic UNIX Documentation with unixdoc

Roman Marxer

There's no need to spend days documenting your servers. I've written a program that can help. unixdoc collects all the configuration files and other information about your computers into an HTML file and sends it to a display server where it can be viewed with a browser. It works on Solaris 2.6/7/8 and on HP-UX 10.20. On the display server, you can see an overview page with all your systems as shown in Figure 1. By selecting a computer, the unixdoc HTML page of this computer will be displayed as shown in Figure 2.

The unixdoc HTML file of a Solaris computer consists of the following 18 sections:

  1. Hardware
  2. Eeprom
  3. Kernel
  4. Networking
  5. Software
  6. Nameservices
  7. Bootup
  8. Disk
  9. Disk Hardware
  10. Users
  11. dmesg
  12. Printers
  13. Cron
  14. Rhosts
  15. Quota
  16. Syslog
  17. Xntpd
  18. Sendmail

The information in these sections consists of either config files or the output of a command. With unixdoc, it is easy to compare the configuration of two servers. You just have to open the two unixdoc HTML pages of the servers and compare the content, section after section. You don't have to do a login on the two servers, or to remember all those commands to display the configuration. I find subsection 4.1.1 ifinfo helpful, because it provides a good overview of all the network interfaces (speed, mode, etc.). (Subsection 4.1.1 is shown in Figure 3.) The information in this subsection is very useful when verifying the speed/mode settings between your switches and servers. An example of the entire unixdoc HTML page can be found at:
http://www.net.li/article

Installation and Configuration

unixdoc consists of two parts -- the client part and the server part.




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