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 …
Category Archives: infrastructures
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. …
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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, …
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Authentication Servers, the Next Generation
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 …
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The New File Server: Puppet and Modules
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 …
The New File Server: Preseeding and LVM
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 …
Making Debian Packages from Commercial Software
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 …
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Client OS Update
(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 …
Client Application Management (Part 2, for stow packages)
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 …
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