I work from home and administer 37 sites around the world.
All nix servers with nt clients.
Nothing ever goes wrong because:
I backup to S3 buckets and NAS with rsync
I have a Plone CMS where I document everything.
Including difficult SQL’s or scripts that I wrote years ago.
Even catalogues of preferred equipment.
Each site manager has a page on this CMS.
And if he even breathes on the server or network then he must record his actions on this page.
Have a public page on your CMS for users with F,A,Q’s and howto’s this way you won’t be bothered by IDtenT problems.
Monitor Everything
UPS, Environment temp and humidity
Cpu’s, Memory, Hard drives
I use Munin, it’s easy to install and write scripts for.
Logwatch will email you daily and other named individuals in your organization with significant logs.
Where ever possible use Open source tools.
Reason: there are more eyes looking at opensource code then commercial software. So fixes and enhancements occur more frequently.
Sit back and relax