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 software people cared [...]
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 [...]
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 presentation
Update: So [...]
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. [...]
Contents of this post have been moved to http://blogs.cae.tntech.edu/mwr/infrastructure-management/