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I’m mildly embarrassed by my previous setup authentication servers, but this one should be a vast improvement. A reminder of the existing constraints and conditions: Lots of Linux systems and a few Solaris systems, some of which dual-boot and aren’t accessible as *nix systems during normal hours of the day An Active Directory already in …
Continue reading “Authentication Servers, the Next Generation”
On to Puppet. I’ve not yet factored everything about the new server out into separate modules or classes; that’ll come later. But things that will either get reused on other systems (e.g., Active Directory ties) or things that need to be generated consistently and repeatedly (e.g., Amanda configurations) have been factored out. The new server’s …
Remember that no one cares if you can back up — only if you can restore. — Amanda 2.5.2 Documentation So we’ve got a new file server in the middle of initial installation and configuration. The file server is one of our most mission-critical systems — if mail goes down, a half-dozen people care. If …
Back many months before I ever set up a blog server, one of the ITS people asked me in passing, “guess what happens if you search tntech.edu for viagra?” I had no idea. The answer (at the time) was a ton of entries in a guestbook or similar for one of the faculty. The answer …
So now that I’ve got all these .deb files made from non-free commercial software packages, and some more packages from unstable (since ANSYS depends on libopenmotif, and I needed a more current version of puppet), and a deb package of Torque based off the work of the nice folks at SARA, I need a place …
One of my main goals for a managed infrastructure is to make sure I have consistent versions of end-user applications installed everywhere. My users aren’t too picky about the version of xemacs installed, but they’ve got pretty stringent requirements on having a particular version of ANSYS, Abaqus, Fluent, Maple, Matlab, and other large non-free/no-source-available software …
Continue reading “Making Debian Packages from Commercial Software”
(Original post here.) For the moment, I’m working on Debian GNU/Linux. Everything bought new (since sometime last fall) has the current stable release (4.0r0, or “etch”) installed, and everything older has the previous stable release (3.1r6, or “sarge”). Assuming that I keep apt sources for both the primary Debian archives and their security updates, the …
UPDATE: this page largely superceded by the stowedpackage puppet definition. Back in part 1, I outlined how I’m getting a consistent package load on my various hosts with pkgsync and puppet. This works great for things that are already included in Debian. And I’ll make .deb packages of some of our third-party commercial applications, too …
Continue reading “Client Application Management (Part 2, for stow packages)”
(Original here.) This is a relatively quick task on my end. The central ITS department handles DNS, I don’t use automount, and the vast majority of UID/GID mappings I already covered in the Authentication Servers post, though it may technically belong here. One other thing at the bottom of the infrastructures.org post bears repeating, even …
Most of the cost of desktop ownership is labor [gartner], and using ad hoc change tools increases entropy in an infrastructure, requiring proportionally increased labor. If the increased labor is applied using ad hoc tools, this increases entropy further, and so on — it’s a positive-feedback cycle. Carry on like this for a short time …