I am currently working on a project for ISPS that simply doesn't want to work correctly. Sure, the project wasn't commissioned by anyone in particular but rather, it was the manifestation of seeing a need and fitting a solution to that need. That need is of documentation. So what is this project that you speak of, James? Well, our office administers somewhere in the neighborhood of 1700 computers and 2 data centers... that equates to about 50 - 100 support tickets per day... we're a busy shop. Users break things, download programs they shouldn't, contract viruses, or just flat our fry the computer at times. As a department, we have some unique ways of fixing these ailments but they aren't set down anywhere.
For this reason, I have taken it upon my self to produce some sort of support repository that would be an easy place to update solutions to various computer problems. For example:
This week, our office has seen a number of cases where users, particularly laptop users, have contracted the notorious VUNDO or VIRTUMUNDO virus. This particularly nasty computer virus blocks anti-virus software, locks itself away with guard dog dll's and even changes it's name at logoff through a registry rewrite.
Some people may be scratching their heads at all of that, but if you're still with me, then you'll realize how nasty such a program is. In fact, there isn't an anti-virus product out there that takes care of everything related to VUNDO, therefore 3rd party programmers have made effective programs freely available. But where are they?!
This was what I faced this week - a learning curve on how to attack such a problem as a computer virus that did not tell me where it was laying. Rather, it hid from me with all it's heuristic intelligence. If we had at hand the necessary documentation to deal with the problem, I would have been able to resolve the infection in a matter of hours (time for the computers to run the various cleaning utilities) rather than having the issues drag on over night.
To this end, I am building a support wiki that will rule the world!... or just our department (with a little luck and some group buy-in). For privacy purposes, I will not disclose the URL to this website but anyone interested is welcome to email me for more details.