title: What methods/techniques/tools do you recommend for documenting systems and infrastructure (runbooks)?
body: <h2>Background</h2>
  <p>I recently joined a small start-up after working at a large company.</p>
  <p>I'm not a professional system administrator, however, because of my programming and systems knowledge I am now the internal person managing our servers and infrastructure.</p>
  <p>In the past, I never needed to document our system information: passwords (for servers, databases, routers, switches, etc), which servers were running which applications (both homemade and installed), server IP addresses, configuration file locations, etc...
  The professional system admins always did this work, freeing me to focus on other areas.</p>
  <h2>Event that triggered urgency</h2>
  <p>I'd been a bit casual about moving this forward until I discovered that I didn't know <em>where</em> my main subversion configuration file was in /etc/apache2 (not to mention that the config file isn't under version control or backed up!) I realized that this needs to be addressed quickly.</p>
  <h2>Next step</h2>
  <p>I now have to figure out how to document all of this in a sane, elegant, access controlled manner.</p>
  <p>I've heard of runbooks, but I don't know the best way or tools to manage them.  My first thought was an excel/openoffice spreadsheet under version control.</p>
  <p>Is there a good guide to maintaining runbooks?  Good software?  This must be a fairly common problem, how do you handle it?</p>