[AusNOG] Wiki for network ops

[Andrew Fort]

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Scott A. McIntyre <scott at howyagoin.net> wrote:
> Hi,
> Sean K. Finn wrote:
>> ATLASSIAN + CONFLUENCE + FISHEYE is a killer combo.
>>
>
> +1 on the Confluence -- used it for NetOps Wiki use for a few years
> $elsewhere; it was the only documentation system which was easy enough
> for people to use that they'd actually keep things up to date.  Recommended.

I was initially a bit of a hater of their stuff (everyone knows how
much I like integrating free software), but over time I've become
enamored with how well the integrations of their tools work together.

I'd been using Fisheye at a few different places for source code
diffing, and for RANCID (or PUNC ;-) configs obviously that is good
too, but it doesn't specifically provide you any benefits over using
CVSweb or whatever (it looks a little nicer, however).  Fisheye also
talks to git and mercurial.  Even perforce, if you're stuck with that
brand of evil.

If you're using the Atlassian greater suite for this workflow,
however, the killer tool to have is Crucible (the code review tool).
You use Jira (issue tracker) and Crucible and then you can create
issues from the diffs themselves, and so on.

So you see a config change come through on a router via fisheye (diff
tool)/crucible (diff tool + line by line reviews e.g., Google Mondrian
or Review Board, basically), you can say "hey fine sir, you forgot "no
ip routing"" or something less dangerous - on the relevant line - and
then create an issue in Jira about it so it gets done.

While it's a slightly non-standard workflow for these tools (usually
Crucible is talking about "actual code" TM), it's well worth
considering.  Hook it up to another source code repository being your
network templating system, and you can link back to a change in there
all in the one set of tools, at the same time.  It's good stuff, and
the pricing is not too difficult to make work (even for netops shops
whose managements are notorious with the tight arse for tools
budgets).

And I'm sure you already knew, but they're Australian.  So if you had
to buy anything.....

-a