Back at the infrastructures.org mothership, client configuration management is described as everything that makes a host unique and/or part of a particular group or domain. And for Unix-like systems, everything pretty much comes down to configuration files, services being enabled/disabled, and cron jobs. Hmm. Configuration files Services Cron jobs Looks like Puppet pretty much handles …
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Client File Access
The infrastructures.org folks list two primary goals of what they call “client file access“: first, consistent access to users’ home directories, and second, consistent access to end-user applications. Some of the things they warn against, such as automounters and the /net directory, we never thought of using to begin with. Their need to consider systems …
File Replication Servers
Back when the infrastructures.org folks were writing their pages, the page for file replication servers described a need to keep current copies of configuration files in /etc and all programs and other data from /usr/local on all the managed systems. In puppet structures, every file or other resource is just a part of a higher-order …
Solaris Jumpstart Installations In An All-Debian Environment
Time to bring the Solaris workstations into our new infrastructure, to discover all the hidden Debian-specific parts in my Puppet manifests, and then fix them to be platform-neutral. First off, I need to be able to ensure a common base installation on my Solaris systems, and to have that base be as hands-off as possible. …
Continue reading “Solaris Jumpstart Installations In An All-Debian Environment”
Why Not Just Send It As Text?
This ad-laden page at about.com talks about why you might want to send emails as plain text by default (bandwidth, misbehaving HTML support in email clients, etc.). Never mind any ugly stationery you might have to look at. So I receive an email memo informing me that since some group of people had trouble printing …
AutoHotkey and Palm Desktop
I’m coming to the realization that my email inbox is not a task management system, it’s an inbox. I don’t need to abuse it as a list of things I need to do, I just need to grab the necessary details from the email and create a regular task in my Treo’s Tasks application. But …
Filing 29 GB of Project Materials
I keep around a lot of project and class materials, both paper and electronic. As far as paper goes: 1 lateral file drawer of B.S. and M.S. class materials 1 lateral file drawer of regular work materials 2 lateral file drawers emptied within the last few months. These mostly contained student tests, projects, and records …
Watching Remote System Status with Nagios and NRPE
I know I’m late to the game with this part of my setup, but nonetheless, I’m happy with the results. The short form of it is that Debian’s nagios-nrpe-server package lets my central Nagios server keep track of my clients’ disk space, load averages, etc. Granted, I already had most of that visible through Ganglia, …
Continue reading “Watching Remote System Status with Nagios and NRPE”