I've spent a great deal of the past 15 years doing two things: building new server, storage, and network infrastructures -- and fixing them when they fall flat on their face for one reason or another. Over that time, I've seen one common theme emerge: There are very easy, seemingly unimportant things you can do when you build and maintain infrastructure that will save your bacon later when things go pear shaped. Most of them involve writing stuff down -- you know, documentation.