I'd have to agree if you are talking value at low cost. I have been a Linux sysadmin for years. A couple years ago ops leadership decided we should all have macbook pros as our work laptops. I honestly have to say the mac out of the box is probably the best *nix sysadmin tool out there. There is broad support for the mac nowadays from third parties and a wealth of tools that run nicely on the mac that are like ice cream to guys like me. If you want X, you can have X, etc. etc. blah blah.

The thing is, it is 100% true that if I had to buy my own laptop, I would go with a year-old thinkpad and put any popular linux distro on it and be able to accomplish anything I had to when it comes to "work".

For example, Video is very smooth on the Mac, but I don't need that to get the job done. My job is 50% command line and 50% web browser so all I really need is a decent shell and a browser I trust that is compatible with the online software I use. Anything else is just extra.

I thought I was a fan but I didn't know this guy even existed until he died, but then that is true for 99.999% of everyone else in the world so nvm I am going to crawl back into my hole now.

... and you KNOW that Uvex is getting exactly the kind of publicity from exactly the demographic they would love to market to, for free.

Now THAT'S good business sense

If the government did this, it would be called "Socialism". I guess its ok for Corporations to do this sort of thing.

Moon all the way. We need to mine some of that yummy Helium-3 so we can finally move forward.

Totally agree. What we have done is have the location, rack, elevation, and purpose in the naming convention for the hardware as well as documenting what that all means in human terms.

Roff and grep are neat if you know which files to grep from, where they live AND what to look for. Companies like Splunk are making money for a reason; i.e. sometimes you need the latest version of everything available for you at a moments notice when it is 3am and your production network is on fire and your boss is over your shoulder screaming at you and customers are on the phone all pissed off, etc. etc. Having a readily available, up to date, single source database of readable information takes the edge off. How do I know? I've been there many times my friend. As far as my credentials, I won't respond to a troll about that.

Wiki's work, but I am thinking more along the lines of Lucene where you can point it at existing data without much effort. Assuming config changes, cert and license data and network diagrams have usable text already associated with them, you can save a great deal of time just indexing what you have.

For me, visio's are great and everything, passwords too, but really the most valuable thing you can do is document single points of failure, outdated software/hardware, etc., license keys/expiration dates, cert expiration dates, personal support contacts you have and all vendor relationship details as well are essential. Do you use change control? If you do, go back and comment your changes, if not, do the best you can at explaining why things are the way they are. Get some open source software that is good at indexing data and create a searchable knowledge base from the information above. Don't concentrate on docs that can be found on the web at first because any admin worth their salt will know where to look for how to's, etc. Focus on the why's, the where's and disaster recovery.

My two cents...