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We’re in the midst of upgrading our Windows Server 2003 servers to 2008R2. Three down, one to go. We noticed that the 2008R2 servers threw errors back to Nagios that the 2003 servers never exhibited. Lots of: CRITICAL SMB anon access: Domain=[CAE] OS=[Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 7600] Server=[Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 6.1] errors. …
Continue reading “Nagios check_smb and Windows Server 2008R2”
My Ruby skills are practically non-existant, but I’ve managed to put together a relatively readable custom fact for identifying my Torque queues by a node’s hostname. Behold, HostgroupFact! Now I can factor out my hosts.equiv files back to a parent class, rather than duplicating the same file specifications on a per-queue basis. class cluster-host inherits …
Continue reading “Stupid Puppet Trick: Identifying Groups of Hosts”
If I apply a set of classes to a puppet client, I may need to roll back those classes’ changes later. Granted, I could just edit out those classes, reformat the system, and rebuild it from scratch, but there may be times when I want to undo my changes in a more granular fashion. So …
It all started so simply: I was going to set up a little Xen instance to be my next cluster submit host, and needed a spare address for it: I started setting up an instance for ch208i.cae.tntech.edu, since it was no longer on the Xen host like it was several months ago. Crap, the reason …
Back in 2000, when some of us in engineering were talking about how best to improve our facilities for high-performance and research computing for our graduate students, we came to a few conclusions: Software was more important than hardware. Some software ran only under Windows, some had no Windows version at all. Of the non-Windows …
Creating a managed infrastructure can go pretty slowly when you’re beset with a combination of bare competence and a work schedule that’s overrun with non-infrastructural tasks. So yes, it’s been just under a year since I wrote up how to make Debian packages from commercial software. On to getting similar capabilities out of the Solaris …
Continue reading “Making Solaris Packages from Commercial Software”
I’m heading to the IT Symposium this morning to give a talk on creating a managed Unix infrastructure from scratch, somewhat of a summary of several things I’ve posted here over the last year or so. Thanks to the folks on #puppet who read over them and gave editing suggestions. Slides for presentation Handouts for …
Continue reading “Giving a Presentation at the Tennessee Higher Education IT Symposium”
I had a user ask for Java to be installed on the cluster systems, so I started up by making a simple JRE5 module for puppet, but this first one didn’t quite work: class jre5 { package { “sun-java5-jre”: ensure => latest; } } It doesn’t work because Sun wants you to agree to its …
I had posted earlier about distributing stowed packages via rsync and puppet to my managed systems, but that method wasn’t quite what I wanted: There was one more file to manage outside my regular puppet manifests, and I’d have to remember to keep them both up to date and in sync. There wasn’t an easy …
Continue reading “The autostow is Dead, Long Live stowedpackage!”
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 …