Confluence: Linux Patching Documentation
For the majority of my time working on Jackson National Life’s Linux system infrastructure, I executed patching and restarting system across the bulk of the network weekly. When I started we only had a small set of perl scripts to capture system status and were manually executing restarts. But our patching schedule increased in pace from a single hypervisor a day to multiple full environments in each data center being patched and rebooted. I collaborated with the senior Unix admin on shift to build out the process further, providing primarily requirements, documentation, and later some additions to the scripts.
The documentation, developed in Atlassian’s Confluence, included the patching schedule, Change management and approvals, hostlist creation, patching execution, formatting for the various script executions, issue resolution and follow up, and tracking for the Unix admin group. It was the same documentation used to train new systems admins in the patching reboot process. This allowed the organization to free up more experienced admins to work on separate projects and would function as a means for newer admins to become acquainted with the infrastructure itself.
categorized under sysadmin
