(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 …
Category Archives: infrastructures
Ad Hoc Change Tools
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 …
Authentication Servers
The whole point of an authentication service is that it allows the client to prove itself to be trustworthy, or at least to prove itself to be the same nefarious character it claims. — Infrastructures.org I want to make our existing Active Directory the source for all the following: Lists of users allowed to log …
Client Application Management (Part 1, for .deb packages)
(Original infrastructures.org writeup here.) Wow, this part has been a learning experience. The things I’ve picked up out of this stage: aptitude is not apt-get. Obvious, yes. But how different they are was not apparent until this weekend. pkgsync is great, and does exactly what it claims, but read its claims very carefully, since it …
Continue reading “Client Application Management (Part 1, for .deb packages)”
Time Synchronization
Time synchronization makes lots of things work better, including: make Kerberos tar syslog We’ve got a central NTP server on campus, and I’m using that to sync from. Puppet handles ntp and ntpdate configuration on the managed systems. Components of that setup: ntp.pp and ntpdate.pp classes imported from puppet/classes Virtualization-detecting facter recipe (originally from here, …
The Gold Server
In infrastructures.org terminology, the gold server is the one location that all clients check in with to see if they need to make any configuration changes. No changes needed? No changes made. No gold server available right now? No changes made, check back later. In theory, this should be a pretty simple server to provision. …
Infrastructures: Version Control
The infrastructures mothership says the following about version control: It may seem strange to start with version control. Many sysadmins go through their entire careers without it. But infrastructure building is fundamentally a development process, and a great deal of shell, Perl, and other code tends to get generated. We found that once we got …
The Beginnings of Infrastructure Management
Contents of this post have been moved to http://blogs.cae.tntech.edu/mwr/infrastructure-management/
Unattended Debian Installations (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the preseed.cfg)
A CMR project recently bought 12 new Dell PowerEdge SC1435 servers to replace some of our aging compute cluster systems. In previous server rollouts, I’d generally get one system installed and configured, image it with SystemImager, and then PXE-boot the rest of the systems to pull that image. However, it’s tough to audit exactly what …