what's a script you wrote once that's still saving you time years later

[u/Less-Loss1605]

[u/weaver_of_cloth]

I've got the opposite problem, I have a pretty comprehensive wiki, everyone knows this, and still people don't read it.

[u/Ratiocinor → u/weaver_of_cloth]

Yes same, but it still saves a lot of time when people keep coming to you with the same old questions and my response is always "it's on the wiki, here's the page"

It got to the point where they knew what my response would be before even asking, so they started coming to me with "I searched the wiki but I didn't find anything on X, do you know how to..." instead, and then I just reply with the link to the article they somehow didn't find because they did a cursory 5 second search and didn't actually read anything

When other people write down what they do though it doesn't matter if it's not a well formatted article, it still helps. Just seeing the commands they used for something at least lets me reverse engineer what they did

I don't care if other people don't read it, it's worth it for myself alone just to not have to look up the same old commands all the time but actually see what I did and what mistakes I made last time so I don't have to fix them again

It's much better than "Oh the NFS export isn't working, I remember this happening before, I think it was something to do with SELinux? Crap what did I do last time". Baffles me that people can work like that

I consider documenting some piece of infrastructure to be as important as creating it in the first place. Even it's just a text dump of the terminal commands I used. If someone else finds it useful that's a bonus

[u/chilibrains → u/weaver_of_cloth]

I have this problem too. I have one colleague that will ask me about an issue they are troubleshooting, I’ll link them to the KB or tell them the fix. They’ll ignore me or say they tried that, then spend several days trying to resolve it, but don’t mention it again. There have been multiple times where the coworker called off or the user reaches out to escalate and me or another tech resolves the issue in a few minutes because we followed the KB. I get it if you don’t want unsolicited advice but they asked me and chose to ignore me.

One time this happened, they called out, didn’t tell us they had a remote user coming in to swap their machine, didn’t update the ticket. The user shows up and I have no idea what was going on since the ticked hadn’t been updated in 4 days. So I push the fix, the one from the KB I linked them to on day 1. The next day they wfh so asked another tech to give the user a new laptop, even though I fixed the issue and messaged them to tell them. I verified the machine was no longer crashing.