Building a Maintenance Script Repository

Do you have an organized library of maintenance scripts? If you are like us, you might be long overdue to create yours... that's what I have now started!

Prelude

We are currently experiencing rather significant internal growth at BCS Group, having recently added two sales reps and two new interns. One of the interns is working directly with me and that required me to rethink how I work, because now it's gone from a single user to a multi-user environment! The main areas included are: Source control (Git), build server (Phing), our VPS, and overall maintenance.

Planning

We have multiple systems that are working together. We currently have one VPS, multiple client web servers, a build server (Phing), a bug tacker (Mantis), and recently just added Moodle. Each of those systems has at least one database, error logs, backups, tasks, and more. Now, before just jumping in and building my initial thoughts out, I decided to do some drafting of it first. My first draft at a directory structure looked like this:

• serverHealth
  • diskUsage
  • logs
  • error
  • access
  • auth
• wwwBackup
  • backup
  • verification
• database
  • Slow Queries
  • Database size
  • errors
• General

Refining the List

My first criticism of my list above is that I'm already confused. Let's say I have a script that consumes db error logs. Would that be under "serverHealth -> logs -> error" or "database -> errors". My quick answer to that would be "It depends" but that isn't acceptable to me. So after some more brainstorming and drafting, I have come up with this:

• bugTracker
  • scheduledTasks
• clientSite
  • backups
  • logFiles
• encryption
• vps
  • general
  • backups
  • www

You'll notice that my final list isn't really much shorter than my original (10 items vs 14) but I have done a better job (IMO) at getting the high level categories defined: bugTracker, clientSite, encryption and vps. Currently, this project is in the very initial phase, stay tuned, once it's really setup I plan on writing a follow up on this!