Great Network Documentation script

[L4ndy]

I don't know how many times I've spent hours bulding a server or trying to sort out a problem and it hasn't phased me (well most of the times), but when the boss asks me to put a server documentation together, a perfect Homer "D'OH!" comes out.
Well, I found this great script that got rid of my D'oh straight away : http://sydiproject.com/download/
It'll create a complete server documentation in less than a minute from your Command Line.
If you have a look at the Readme file you can even set it up so it runs against multiple servers Simultaneously.
You can also create documentations for your MS Exchange organisation and any MS Sql servers.

Hope you find it useful

[Nonapeptide]

Thanks! I'll be taking a look into the SYDI project now. Do you have any other personal experience with it that you'd care to share?

[L4ndy]

Yep, maybe don't try to run it against a MySQL server running on an XP machine because it'll create a huge document around 200 pages with loads of nonsense data on it. At least that's what happened with me.
I havent tried the Ms exchange and Ms SQL yet.
Let us know if you get to do that before me.

Cheers

[graycat]

Originally Posted by Nonapeptide

Thanks! I'll be taking a look into the SYDI project now. Do you have any other personal experience with it that you'd care to share?

I've used it for about the last 5 yrs and can highly recommend it! When we recently merged offices and wanted to document everything from scratch, this was the tool we used.

the only "bad" side of it is that Patrick, the developer, is now very busy on other projects so struggles to update things as often as he used to. It's not a gripe at all as the scripts are great and easy to customise, it's more of a warning really.

Check out his website here.


Edit: thought I'd actually add something a bit more indepth as I was here.

If you run the raw script against a PC or "plain" server then you will probably get between 10 and 15 pages of info. Against a DC or a similar server, I've got 30+ pages out of it so you're definitely not lacking in detail! However, unless you really need to know what hotfixes are installed etc, I'd skip that part and just get the rest.
Running SYDI-Exchange against an Exchange box will give you some good info but don't expect it to push down into things like mailbox sizes etc

One thing I do like but have yet to get working fully is the automated approach. Using the xml scripts you can run SYDI without having MS Word on your machine and get the output as xml which can be thrown back in and convert to something useful.