Page 742 - StudyBook.pdf

726 Chapter 12 • Operational and Organizational Security: Policies and Disaster Recovery

4. When the Save As dialog box appears, enter the name for this
text file in the File name field, and select where you want to save
the file. Click the Save button to save the file and continue.
5. Open the text file using Notepad or another text editor, and view
the information about the system documented inside the file.

Change Documentation

Nothing stays the same and change is inevitable.These are the reasons why change
documentation is so important. Change control documentation provides informa-
tion of changes that have been made to a system, and often provides back out steps
that show how to restore the system to its previous state.Without this, changes
made to a system could go unrecorded causing issues in the future. Imagine starting
a job as the new network administrator, and finding that the only documents about
the network were the systems architecture documentation that your predecessor
created seven years ago when the system was first installed.After years of adding
new equipment, updating software, and making other changes, the current system
would barely resemble its original configuration. If change documentation had
been created, you would have had a history of those changes, which could have
been used to update the systems architecture documentation.
Change documentation can provide valuable information, which can be used
when troubleshooting problems and upgrading systems. First, it should state why a
change occurred. Changes should not appear to be for the sake of change, but be
for good reason, such as fixing security vulnerabilities, hardware no longer being
supported by vendors, new functionality, or any number of other reasons.The doc-
umentation should also outline how these changes were made and detail the steps
that were performed.At times, an administrator may need to justify what was done,
or need to undo changes and restore the system to a previous state, because of
issues resulting from a change. In such cases, the change documentation can be
used as a reference for backtracking the steps taken.
Logs and Inventories

Logs can be valuable tools when troubleshooting problems and identifying adverse
incidents (e.g., intrusions to the system). Many systems provide logs that give auto-
mated information on events that have occurred, including accounts that were used

www.syngress.com