visually documenting web server configuration and infrastructure
- by Alex Ciarlillo
I have just finished a large re-organization and update of our institutions web server(s). This server hosts 3 virtual hosts, 3-4 blogs, 2 wikis, some legacy static HTML pages, and many hosted documents (PDF, .jpg, .xls).
I have organized the site into a structure of something like:
/var/www/sites/vhost1, vhost2, vhost3
.../wordpress/blogX
.../mediawiki/wikiX
Data is in a seperate directory structure so I can run a cron task over it to make sure it is all writeable and such. I then symlink to these data directories for each application.
/var/www/data/vhost1, vhost2, vhost3
.../wordpress/blogX/uploads
.../mediawiki/wikiX/images
All Apache configs are in /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.d/vhost1,2,3.conf
On top of this there is also a testing server which mirrors this setup. Once changes are fully tested, they are rsynced down to the live server.
All the wordpress installs and mediawiki installs are straight form SVN and updates are done by switching branches or "svn up".
So my question is how can I best document to share with a) co-workers, b) possible future replacement, c) myself 6 months from now. Obviously I can make a wiki page, excel document, whatever and fill it with text, but I am looking for a more visual representation that I can use to explain the architecture to less-technical people. Ideally it would be awesome if this visual representation could then be expanded to get more technical details.