|
Softpanorama
(slightly skeptical)
Open Source Software Educational Society |
May the
source be with you,
but remember the KISS principle ;-)
|
Enterprise System Management Resources
The KISS rule can be expanded as: Keep It Simple,
Sysadmin ;-)
When taking about ESM large and expensive ESM packages like
Tivoli, HP OpenView,
Sun Management Center are
naturally come to mind. Among enterprise tools this page provides some info on
Tivoli just because this is a system that the
author has some experience with. In the
O'Reilly paper
Top Five Open
Source Packages for System Administrators they list the following (I do not like Cfengine):
Anyway there are open source tools that can do the job just fine.
especaully in system monitoring area. Software distribution and
configuration management are much more complex things. Here enterprise class
solution like Tivoli Configuration manager might pay off more quickly.
Notes:
- This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help
You For Free) site written by people for whom English
is not a native language.
Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be
expected.
- The site contain some broken links
as it develops like a living tree...
Please try to use Google, Open directory,
etc. to find a replacement link (see
HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate
if you can
mail us a correct link.
|
|
|
|
IBM Autonomic Task Manager for Administrators (ATMA) is a
spreadsheet-based scripting environment for quickly composing and
automating system management tasks. With this environment,
administrators can execute management commands and combine these
commands to create ad hoc scripts and visualizations of system
management information. The basic building blocks for these tasks are
spreadsheet templates that are customized with a simple drag-and-drop
interface. Autonomic Task Manager for Administrators enables the
insertion of GUI, visualization, or system management components into
cells of a spreadsheet and customization of the cells in order to insert
control logic for a system management solution. Just as in spreadsheets,
data in the cells are automatically processed and updated; this feature
allows real-time system data feeds.
Currently, Autonomic Task Manager for Administrators supports a
variety of system management plug-ins, including Simple Network
Management Protocol (SNMP), Secure Shell (SSH), and Java™ Management
Extension (JMX). Using ATMA's component plug-in API, developers can
build custom components that can be used to develop tools using
different management APIs; one such API interfaces to IBM Autonomic
Integrated Runtime Environment, which allows communication with
resources based on Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM). ATMA can
also interact with any Java object.
Autonomic Task Manager for Administrators significantly reduces
script creation time with its familiar spreadsheet interface and
building blocks made from templates. The package includes the
executable, relevant plug-ins, installation instructions, and user
documentation.
How does it work?
System administrators or value-added re-sellers (VARs) can use the
spreadsheet-based scripting environment to build scripts incrementally,
potentially starting from templates and using standard components. After
a script is developed, it can immediately become available for use or
further customization.
Depending on the specific administrative function being addressed,
this technology helps to tie together the various underlying components.
The cells may contain numbers and text, as in most spreadsheets, as well
as GUI objects such as buttons and checkboxes, visualization objects
such as plots and pie charts, programming objects such as collections
and timers, and system objects such as JMX, SNMP, etc. These objects can
be either created by the user or assigned to cells as a result of
evaluating expressions that define the functional relationship between
objects in various cells.
Examples are included in the documentation provided with this
package.
Remote Server Management Tool is an Eclipse plug-in
that provides an integrated graphical user interface
(GUI) environment and enables testers to manage multiple
remote servers simultaneously. The tool is designed as a
management tool for those who would otherwise telnet to
more than one server to manage the servers and who must
look at different docs and man pages to find commands
for different platforms in order to create or manage
users and groups and to initiate and monitor processes.
This tool handles these operations on remote servers by
using a user-friendly GUI; in addition, it displays
configuration of the test server (number of processors,
RAM, etc.). The activities that can be managed by this
tool on the remote and local server are divided as
follows:
- Process Management: This utility lists
the process running on UNIX and Windows® servers.
One can start and stop processes. Along with process
listing, the utility also provides details of the
resources used by the process.
- User Management: This utility facilitates
creation of users and groups on UNIX servers; it
also provides options for listing, creating,
deleting, and modifying the attributes of users and
groups.
- File Management: This utility acts as a
windows explorer for any selected server,
irrespective of its operating system. One can
create, edit, delete, and copy files and directories
on local or remote servers. Testers can tail the
remote files.
How does it work?
This Eclipse plug-in was written with the Standard
Widget Toolkit (SWT). The tool has a perspective named
Remote System Management; the perspective consists of
test servers and a console view. The remote test servers
are mounted in the Test Servers view for management of
their resources (process, file system, and users or
groups).
At the back end, this Eclipse plug-in uses the
Software Test Automation Framework (STAF). STAF is an
open-source framework that masks the operating
system-specific details and provides common services and
APIs in order to manage system resources. The APIs are
provided for a majority of the languages. Along with the
built-in services, STAF also supports external services.
The Remote Server Management Tool comes with two STAF
external services: one for user management and another
for proving system details.
At Novell BrainShare today, Novell and Dell joined hands in launching
a software product for remote management of servers running either
Novell's own SUSE Linux or a competing Linux distribution put out by Red
Hat, Novell's long-time archrival.
Pegged for availability on April 19, the jointly developed software
for Dell PowerEdge servers will be dubbed Novell Zenworks 7 Linux
Management - Dell Edition, said Jason Werner, a Novell product marketing
manager, during a pre-briefing with Linux Today.
The upcoming software package "takes our Zenworks Linux management
product and adds a layer of Dell-specific management," according to
Werner.
The new Dell Edition of Zenworks will be geared mainly to
organizations with multiple remote PowerEdge servers, "where you
wouldn't necessarily have Linux expertise (on site) at all locations,"
Werner said.
Target customers include organizations engaged in server
consolidation as well as those that are migrating servers from Microsoft
Windows to either SUSE or Red Hat.
The Dell Edition will be the first iteration of Zenworks tailored to
managing both of these two major distributions of Linux. Novell did not
work directly with Red Hat in creating the product, he said.
But together with Dell, a long-time Red Hat ally, Novell has been
tweaking Zenworks to support Red Hat environments.
Already tested by Novell on both SUSE and Red Hat Linux, the product
will bring together Zenworks features such as remote provisioning and
inventory management with capabilities specific to Dell's PowerEdge
platform. The Dell-specific tools will deal with areas ranging from bios
administration to remote access management.
Novell Zenworks 7, Linux Management - Dell Edition will not replace
the Dell OpenManage software that has shipped for some time with
PowerEdge servers, Werner said.
"But [the Zenworks] software will cover the entire [server]
lifecycle, including pre-OS and RAID," he told Linux Today.
Through the new Dell edition, administrators in remote locations will
have access to detailed bios and firmware information. "You'll be able
to run queries to find out what has been deployed on a server," he
added.
Administrators will also be able to make configuration changes
remotely, repurposing a system "simply by changing it from a Web server
to a storage server, for example," according to the Novell executive.
Configuration changes made on one server can be quickly promulgated
among other servers that perform the same roles, reside in the same
geographies, or have the same models and makes.
"You can even adjust the utility partition on the hard drive when no
OS is present," Werner said. Consequently, he suggested, organizations
can be more certain that configuration settings will remain consistent
among a group of servers.
On the other hand, the product will also support capabilities built
into Zenworks for assigning administrative rights only to authorized
individuals, Werner said.
The Dell edition of Zenworks will be sold separately from PowerEdge
servers. The product will not be available through Novell or its
resellers.
Instead, sales will be performed exclusively through Dell, according
to Werner.
As some analysts see it, today's announcement by Novell and Dell
reflects an increasingly visible industry-wide trend toward better Linux
management tools.
"It's really obvious that [Linux management] tools are getting
broader, more sophisticated, and better able to integrate with outside
systems," said Andy Mann, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management
Associates (EMA), during another interview.
But although Hewlett-Packard and IBM Tivoli have accomplished some
penetration of the Linux management market, much of the innovation so
far has come from smaller vendors such as Levanta, Velocity Software,
and Opsware, according to Mann.
But many Linux administrators have relied mainly on tools from Novell
and Red Hat. "So it's good to see a company such as Novell getting
behind some new management software," added the analyst, who is also the
author of a recently released report from EMA called "Get the Truth on
Linux Management."
Co-sponsored by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and Levanta, one
of the OSDL's members, the study of over 200 Linux companies dismisses
earlier claims that Linux has a higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as
"no longer true."
Mann also told Linux Today that support for other Linux distributions
could prove useful to Novell. "Zen is [basically] open source software,
[but] with some proprietary components. It should be in Novell's best
interests to support as many other distributions of Linux as it can, to
further the growth of Linux," he said.
"Support for other distros could only help Novell. It certainly
couldn't hurt," concurred David Dennis, Levanta's director of marketing.
Dennis noted that many Linux customers are now seeking multi-distro
support as a way of avoiding "vendor lock-in."
Levanta's management tools support both SUSE and Red Hat Linux, along
with a "second tier" of distros such as CentOS and Asianux, according to
the marketing director.
But Dennis also maintained that Linux management tools vary along a
number of other lines, based on the administrative capabilities needed
in particular types of deployments.
Novell has already been providing hefty Linux management support
through its multiplatform Zenworks lineup, observed Fred Broussard, an
IDC analyst, in another interview with Linux Today.
Broussard also pointed out that it isn't at all unusual for
competitors in the computer industry to cooperate on some levels.
"We've heard a lot over the years about Novell and Red Hat having an
adversarial relationship," according to the IDC analyst.
"But at the end of the day, Novell is going to do what its customers
want. Novell is a very customer-centric company," Broussard told Linux
Today.
Novell's Werner declined to comment one way or the other on whether
other products supporting multiple Linux distributions are also in the
works at Novell. "Not that we've made public comments on," Werner told
Linux Today.
The upcoming Novell Zenworks 7 Linux Management - Dell Edition will
be priced at $69 per license.
If you're a good administrator, you pride yourself on
developing a fundamental understanding of the systems you build. After a
while, as you begin to comprehend the complete complexity that goes along with
building and maintaining your infrastructure, the commands and procedures to
control them become second nature. You have to look at the documentation less
and less, until eventually people refer to you as a guru. Having this kind of
understanding of your servers is important, but it does no good if you aren't
available when something crashes. By creating detailed written policies
detailing the ins and outs of your systems in advance, you can provide
critical background information to your backup admin who can use it to restore
functionality in your absence.
V. Thou shalt document complete and effective
policies and procedures
In the past I found documented policies useful
especially at two different times. The first is at the inception of a project.
Before the system goes into production, sometimes even before the hardware is
bought, detail in writing exactly what you need the server to accomplish,
where its performance bottlenecks will be, and what your intentions are to
correct these issues. This will allow you (and upper management!) to know that
your time is not being spent chasing a fantasy implementation that will never
work. It also helps you to better understand the nature of the beast you're
building. If anything goes wrong during the installation and configuration
process (and something always does) you'll be better prepared to deal with it
simply due to the better understanding you've obtained by mapping everything
out beforehand. At this point you don't need anything more than an outline
(sometimes in the form of a project plan) and a few diagrams to guide you. If
it's a much larger-scale implementation though, you'll need a detailed project
plan dividing the entire process into phases. For instance, a large-scale
Beowulf cluster would require a detailed project plan, while a new intranet
Web server might only require a brief outline of configuration tasks and a
diagram showing how it's integrated into network.
The second time that these policies are important is
after the server has finished configuration and is ready to go into a
production environment. At this point, before it is rolled out, you should
take some time to create some detailed step-by-step documents explaining the
backup restoration process, the steps necessary to restart a service (or just
make a list of important services that might need to be restarted, depending
upon the experience of your back admins) and anything else that might be
helpful. Just remember that you won't always be available to fix something;
having detailed instructions for common problems or routine exercises can make
the difference between 10 minutes of downtime and a week and a half if you are
unavailable.
The commandments so far:
I.
Thou shalt make regular and complete backups
II.
Thou shalt establish absolute trust in thy servers
III.
Thou shalt be the first to know when something goes down
IV.
Thou shalt keep server logs on everything
V. Thou shalt document complete and effective policies and procedures
[Nov 02, 2005]
MValent to release updated apps management software - Computerworld Two companies offer products that are similar to mValent's
offering: Relicore Inc. in Burlington, Mass., and Collation Inc. in Redwood
City, Calif. But mValent seems to be unique because it focuses on the entire
life cycle of managing applications, from predeployment into deployment,
Drogseth said.
(COMPUTERWORLD) - MValent Inc. next week
plans to take the wraps off the latest version of mValent Integrity, software that's designed to
automate the configuration and management of
application and Web servers and other application
components.
The software, which will be available on Monday,
starts at $60,000 and will be deployed by several
existing mValent customers, including WorldWinner
Inc., an online gaming company in Newton, Mass., and
State Street Corp., a financial services company in
Boston, according to executives at the companies.
... ... ...
State Street expects to upgrade to mValent
Integrity soon, said Joseph Kennedy, State Street's
vice president of IT. State Street wants to stay
current with the product, since prior versions have
reduced the time needed to debug new application
configurations. State Street uses MValent software
to monitor a variety of systems that affect its
19,000 employees, he said.
Kennedy said mValent has helped the financial
services firm add scalability to its application
infrastructure and resolve problems with
configurations, something he called "invaluable."
State Street has been able to expand the application
environments it maintains without adding system
administrators, he said.
MValent Integrity appears to be unique in the
market, said two analysts, Jean-Pierre Garbanim at
Forrester Research Inc. and Dennis Drogseth at
Enterprise Management Associates.
[Oct 7, 2005]
mValent ¦ Powerful Change
Control
mValent Integrity
tracks changes to deployed servers and monitors
configuration drift alerting IT teams to potentially
critical problems. By comparing application
environments in mValent Integrity for differences in
granular configuration items, IT teams rapidly
isolate root causes of production incidents. These
teams can then model fixes to problems to validate
their impact and automatically deploy them.
- Rich Compare
Capabilities – mValent Integrity's Compare
function aids troubleshooting by quickly
pinpointing differences between multiple server
instances or across infrastructure stacks
representing different application environments.
- Versioning and
Rollback - Running 'snapshots' of application
infrastructure environments, plus the ability to
recover quickly from unwanted changes.
- Tracking and
Alerts - Knowing when a change has been made - no
matter what changed - and accurately reporting on
the specific properties before and after the
change, gives IT teams early warning on potential
problems.
- Point-in-Time
Views - By keeping a running record of changes to
a granular level, mValent Integrity reports on all
changes that occurred between two points in time,
or show that no unapproved changes took place.
- Audit Reports –
Show the changes made to an individual server or a
whole production environment by time period or by
user.
The Book
of Webmin
Webmin is a web-based interface for system
administration for Unix. Using any browser that supports
tables and forms (and Java for the File Manager module),
you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing
and so on.
Webmin consists of a simple web server, and a number
of CGI programs which directly update system files like
/etc/inetd.conf and /etc/passwd. The
web server and all CGI programs are written in Perl
version 5, and use no non-standard Perl modules.
[Oct 25, 2003]
Cultured Perl Application configuration with Perl
The simple approach: Do it yourself (DIY)
Theoretically (and with the right tools!) anyone can build a configuration
parser, right? The
Perl Cookbook, for one, shows a quick implementation that provides a good
start. So how hard can it be to write a configuration file parser if you begin
with this kind of implementation?
Quite hard, actually, because this kind of project raises several more
complex issues like these:
- Blank lines and comments in the configuration file
- Erroneous lines (like misspelled keywords), and the question of which
are critical and which can be ignored
- The probability that you may have to write your own parser, because you
are likely to need a variety of different data structures (booleans,
scalars, arrays, and hashes, for example)
- Multiple configuration files
- Variable defaults
- Integrating command-line options with the file configuration and
controlling how they interact
- Educating users in yet another DIY configuration file format (This
usually goes something like: "This will work, as long as you have no '=' on
a line by itself. Oh, and comments begin with '#' but they have to be by
themselves. Don't forget to use uppercase for the keywords and lowercase for
the values. Come back! Come back! I didn't tell you about the mandatory
keywords!")
- Rewriting or copying possibly buggy configuration code instead of
reusing a module
- Making the configuration an object with a consistent interface instead
of the usual DIY haphazard hash of keywords
Scared yet? That's why we have AppConfig. It can handle all these concerns.
It's more than likely that DIY is not what you should be using.
[Sept 15, 2003]
The road to better programming Chapter 6. Developing cfperl, from the beginning
O'Reilly Network Top Five Open
Source Packages for System Administrators I do not like Cfengine. IMHO
although the idea is good implementation does not substantially improves
sysadmin productivity in comparison with rsh and regular scripts in Ksh93 and
Perl.
Solaris 8
Administrator's Guide Chapter 4 Network Configuration By
Paul Watters January 2002 ISBN 0-596-00073-1,400 pages
After undertaking the complex tasks required to configure a
single host, planning and setting up an entire network can be daunting. In
this chapter, you'll learn how to configure a Solaris-based network, including
the configuration of single or multiple network interfaces, static and dynamic
routing, and network troubleshooting. In addition, examples for enabling
devices and testing interfaces will be provided.
Developer Todo
About: Developer Todo is a program to assist developers in maintaining
a list of outstanding tasks in a heirarchical, colourised, and prioritised list.
Additionally, it can automatically list outstanding items when you change into a
directory.
Changes: Fixed more GCC 3.x compilation problems, and a problem when
running without the TERM environment variable set.
f2w Helpdesk at Sourceforge
About: f2w helpdesk is a Web-based helpdesk package. It allows
requests to be categorised to an arbitrary level of detail using a
expert-system-like question and answer method. Advice and problem-specific
information can be associated with the request categories, thus building up a
knowledge base to speed the resolution of frequently occurring problems. Users
can also add their own tasks, thus using it as a todo list or for workflow
within teams, and notes can be added to each request at any time.
Changes: Minor user interface improvements, bugfixes in the Oracle
configuration script, a new MS SQL configuration, and the automatic addition of
new help desk operators to at least one team (without this, they can't do much).
About: Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor similar to the
command top. For every interval (default 10 seconds), it shows system-level
activity related to the CPU, memory, swap, disks and network layers, and it
shows for every active process the CPU utilization in system and user mode, the
virtual and resident memory growth, priority, username, state, and exit code.
The process level activity is also shown for processes which finished during the
last interval (for this reason process accounting is switched on), to get a
complete overview about the consumers of things such as CPU time. Atop only
shows the active system-resources and processes, and only shows the deviations
since the previous interval (e.g., the memory growth rather than total memory
usage per process). Unfortunately, the standard kernel does not maintain
counters about the number of disk and network accesses issued per process. Later
on, kernel patches will be made available to add these process level counters.
The current version of atop is already prepared to display these counters.
Changes: Process accounting is now handled securely by creating a
separate subdirectory in /tmp. Disk types other than sda and hda are now
recognized. Other bugfixes and modifications include allowing users to run
without process accounting, avoiding flag list and buffer overflows, and correct
access times for disks in SMP systems.
SSGDOC - System Administration at cs.unm.edu
This document
contains documentation, procedure, and policy for the Systems Support group.
Reading and maintaining it is a required element to employment in the Systems
Support Group - it is vital in order for us to provide consistent (hopefully
excellent) service to the CS department. It should be kept as terse as
possible (otherwise no one will read it) while providing sufficient
documentation so that all (especially new) members will have a good running
start at understanding the technical composition of the site, and the group's
procedures and policies of operation. CS.UNM.EDU's technical composition has
been largely modelled after the LISA paper available at http://www.infrastructures.org.
If you hope to understand the document you are currently reading, you really
must first read the Infrastructures paper upon which this practical document
is modelled after.
[Aug 8, 2001] Several useful papers from SysAdmin Magazine
Understanding and Preventing
System Slowdowns
Submitted by <Jamie Wilson> on
Friday at
08:44:55 (EDT))
A
Sunworld article analyzes performance issues on Sun systems and gives
advice on how to track them down. The article discusses the use of tools, such
as sar, netstat and top to analyze the location of a bottleneck.
LinuxFreak Monitoring your desktop machine
Monitoring your desktop machine
Cat: Feature, Posted June 04, 2000 by
gh0ul
Many people who start out with Linux using just X, never
notice a lot of the things that can go on with a Linux system. Some of those
things should be monitored or atleast kept an eye on.In this article we will
go over a couple methods of watching over your Linux box from the X windowing
System.First off, we will go over a traffic monitor called 'trafshow'.
trafshow is a light and easy traffic monitor that displays information about
connections to your system, for example, if someone telnets to you, it will
display their ip, the protocol, and port.. very simple information for just
keeping an eye open. You can get it
from here. Grab trafshow-1.3.tar.gz, un-tar and
compile it, you should be able to simply untar it and issue a make && make
install in the directory (must be root for the make install)
After that, go ahead and open an xterm, I suggest using
the flags:
xterm -bg black -fg white Then you can su and start trafshow, or
some may prefer to give it root permissions so they would not need to su
anymore, but others might prefer to keep it root only, so that if you have
users on your system whom you don't want to see your connections, you'll still
be good to go. It's suggested that you keep the terminal
open with trafshow running at all times, so if you are ever curious about a
connection, you can simply take a look and see what's going where.
Another pretty popular traffic monitor
is iptraf, it does a lot of the same as trafshow, yet can be configured more,
and also will log data. You can find it here:
ftp://ftp.cebu.mozcom.com/pub/linux/net/iptraf-2.2.1.tar.gz
Some other helpful network monitoring tools:
These are NOT full proof anti-hack methods to take on your
system, but these should help you out a bit, and they are always handy to go
along with normal system administration.
Linux
Magazine January 2000 GURU GUIDANCE Big Brother Is Watching
Fortunately, this Big Brother is truly your friend. However,
like its Orwellian namesake, it is constantly on the lookout for things it
doesn't like, waiting to sound an alarm. I am talking about a
systems-monitoring tool developed by Sean MacGuire of The MacLawran Group (http//www.maclawran.ca/bb-dnld/)
called Big Brother.
Big Brother does most things that you'll find in commercial
monitoring tools; it can let you know when a machine on your network is down
or becoming overloaded or when a filesystem is getting too full; it can tell
you when specific processes are or are not running on clients; it can even
page you when a specific event occurs. It can be used to monitor Unix, Linux,
Windows NT, and NetWare clients.
One of the main reasons you'll want to try out Big Brother
is because of its simplicity. It is composed of just a handful of scripts and
programs, which collect information and report it to a central server, which
displays everything in an accessible HTML format. Big Brother's scripts are
easy to change and reconfigure, allowing you to customize the software to suit
your network.
Although it is not covered directly by the GNU General
Public License, you can download Big Brother for free from the MacLawran
Group's Web site. It is covered by a "fair use" license, which requires
written permission from the MacLawran Group to redistribute it.
[Jul 29, 2000]
Slashdot Are Buffer Overflow Sploits Intel's Fault -- interesting discussion
about problems with C
[Jul 29, 2000]
Slashdot Preventing Vendors From Playing The Blame Game -- several
insightful posts about AIX, Websphere, etc.
Issue #92 Mailing From Scripts - Focus On Linux - 07-23-00
The old Unix mailer at /bin/mail is one of the programs that
really helped to launch the Internet as we know it today. In days gone by, it
was one of the most used binaries on any Unix workstation.
Today, the /bin/mail binary can still be used, but is horribly outdated --
it's a text-only mailer with almost no features at all.
It is good, however for one thing: automated mailing, such
as sending e-mail from a shell script. To send mail with the /bin/mail
program, use this syntax:
mail -s "subject" touser@address < body_text
For example, if your e-mail address is joehalliway@nowhere.com,
and you needed to have the login information from the last command on a
given system sent to you every night at a given time, you could create a cron
job which called this command:
last | mail -s "Login information" joehalliway@nowhere.com
When executed, this command would send the output from the
last command to your e-mail box with the subject given. There are many
uses for the /bin/mail program when employed this way in scripts; use your
imagination.
Focus on Linux Forum /bin/mail other than text
You can use bin mail to also mail attachments. This was not
mentioned
in the article so I thought I might help out a few hapless souls.
To use /bin/mail to mail a attachment you must also have
uuencode
installed. Not to worry though, most distributions include this by
default. Anyhow on to the good stuff.
So I'm in my home directory /home/possum and there is a file
in there
called attachment.txt. I can send this file two ways:
The first makes the attachment.txt show in the mail, in
other words the mail will contain the contents of attachment.txt. To do this I
enter the command "mail
whoever@wherever.com < attachment.txt".
The second way send attachment.txt as an attachment. I had
wanted to
do this many times and was unable to until I found uuencode could make this
happen. To send it as an attachment I would enter the command "uuencode
attachment.txt attachment.txt | mail
whoever@wherever.com". In the command line the first attachment.txt is the
name of the file I want to send. The second attachment.txt is the name of the
attachment the recipient will get. Pipe that to mail and Viola you have sent
an attachment from a command line or shell script. Happy
scripting, Paul
Issue #92 Calling Commands When Booting - Focus On Linux - 07-23-00
Linux Today - Linuxuser.co.za Tricks with -etc-issue
When your Linux System boots it starts "getty" processes on
a number of virtual terminals on your system. When getty starts, it prints the
contents of /etc/issue to the terminal. To customize the look of your console,
all you have to do is edit /etc/issue.
You can also add colour by using the colour capabilities of
the Linux console. The Linux console, like almost any other existing terminal,
has escape sequences that can be used to change the appearance of text on
screen. Piping the following script into /etc/issue:
#!/bin/sh
spaces(){
COUNT=0;
while [ $COUNT -lt $1 ]; do
echo -ne " ";
COUNT=$[$COUNT+1]
done
}
esc="\033["
echo -ne "${esc}H${esc}J\n${esc}44;37;1m"
WELCOME="Welcome to "`hostname`" running Linux "`uname -r`
CHARS=$[(80-`echo $WELCOME | wc --chars`)/2]
spaces $CHARS
echo -ne $WELCOME
spaces $CHARS
echo -ne "${esc}0m\n\\l "
should produce this result:
... ... ... ... ...
Linux Today - O'Reilly Network What is a Network Administrator Anyway
TechRepublic: Establishing quotas for users on a Linux network(Jul 22, 2000)
RootPrompt.org: Using expect for System Administration(Jul 12, 2000)
LinuxPR: Linux Network Administrator's Guide Revised and Expanded (Jul 11,
2000)
RootPrompt.org: Trust and the System Administrator(Jun 19, 2000)
32BitsOnline: Book [Review]: Essential System Administration(May 21, 2000)
LinuxWorld: Relief for sysadmin headaches(May 02, 2000)
O'Reilly Network: CYA for System Administrators; Things to keep in mind in our
litigious society(Apr 21, 2000)
SunWorld: Xvfb - A conversation every system administrator should hear(Mar
26, 2000)
Sys
Admin: Policy Routing in Linux(Mar 18, 2000)
Linux Journal: Book Review --Linux System Administration(Feb 27, 2000)
osOpinion: The newbie network administrator and open source: I fear Skippy(Jan
11, 2000)
BW:
DigitalThink Announces Completion of Linux/UNIX System and Network
Administration Series(Dec 29, 1999)
(May 9, 2000, 07:27 UTC) (425 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by
marty)
"The file /etc/inetd.conf is vitally
important to your system's security and well-being -- especially if your system
has a 24x7 connection to the Internet."
[Jan 27, 2000] Administering Linux using CVS.
Much emphasis has of late been put on making Linux easier to
manage. Typically the model used it that of a single user managing one or more
systems. However, once mutiple administrators and automated scripts are all
altering the configuration for a single machine the sutiation becomes somewhat
more complex. This problem is in essence very similar to the problem software
developers face when a team is working on a source tree. There are many
solutions to this problem, one of the most popular being Concurrent Versions
System or CVS.
Twinkle-Toes Release 4th February 1999.
[Jan 23, 2000]
Version 2.0 of the Netware
file system has been
announced by the Timpanogas Group. It is currently only available in binary
form. Source is evidently forthcoming, but has been delayed due to some
weirdness that is best read directly from the announcement.
[Jan 23, 2000]
System
Administration Made Simpler, Part 4 -- VNC
(Virtual Network Computing)
Who says system administration can't be fun? My lovely and
wonderful wife, Sally, is busy using this week's system administration feature
to play Kpoker, the K Desktop Environment poker game. She's not busy
checking on logs, administering print queues, or even running a process
analyzer. She's playing poker. Of course, earlier on, I took control of her
Windows 95 PC and started to edit a letter she was working on, so it probably
serves me right. In the interest of telling you all about this marvelous tool,
I decided to connect to her Windows 95 session and see how the KDE poker game
she was playing on our server was doing. Turns out she was losing all our
money. Well, that's gambling for you.
Oh--did I mention I am talking about a fantastic remote
administration tool that works with not only Windows, Solaris, DEC Alphas
running OSF1, but even that old favorite of the desktop publishing world, the
MacIntosh?
This great tool is VNC (Virtual Network Computing)
from AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge, England. VNC is a package that allows you
to view other computer desktops from your own desktop. For instance, I could
be running an X server on a Linux machine from a Windows 95 or NT box, or
doing the reverse. I can do it from my internal network or across the
Internet.
The system administrator in a large company with a number of
Windows workstations knows the headaches of all the simple "operator" error
calls that nonetheless require a great deal of work and time as you walk the
user through the right steps to solve their problems. Wouldn't it be great if
you could take control of their desktops and do it for them while they
watch and learn? Now, I know there are commercial packages that can do this,
but not necessarily from your Linux desktop. They also cost more than VNC.
That's right. VNC is distributed free of charge.
[Jan 3, 2000]
Portable Unix Toolkit (unix scripts)
Most
of these scripts are Korn shell scripts, a few are Perl or Expect scripts. The
Demo Edition, which is distributed as freeware, contains 11
scripts. The Professional Edition contains a
total of 49 scripts and includes all the scripts in the Demo Edition as well as
the login environment files. The Enterprise Edition
contains a total of 78 scripts and includes all the scripts in the Demo Edition
as well as the login environment files. (Some of the Enterprise Edition scripts
work only on Solaris, AIX or HP-UX - see the list below.) The Master
Edition includes the Professional Edition and the Enterprise Edition
for a total of 106 scripts and over 7,000 lines of code. Click on the
script names (below) to view the manual pages for the scripts.
The Portable Unix Shell Environment
The Portable Unix Shell Environment (PUSE) is a set of Korn
shell
login environment files and about
80
Korn shell, Perl and Expect scripts that have been ported to several
versions of Unix. It is distributed at no charge as open source software. The
scripts, which can be used independently of the login environment files,
include general utility scripts and systems administration scripts.
The Portable Unix Shell Environment allows the user to, for
example:
- Substitute one string for another in all the text files
in a directory hierarchy.
- List all the subdirectories in one or more directories,
including symbolic links to directories.
- Copy a file to multiple remote hosts, with backup of the
target file on each host.
- List the city or region for a telephone area code or
vice-versa.
- Use a single set of Korn shell login environment files (.profile,
.kshrc) in a heterogeneous Unix network.
The PUSE has been downloaded 825 times since February 1999.
It has been tested on Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, HP-UX 10.00, 10.20, AIX 3.2.5,
4.1.4, 4.3.2, Ultrix 4.3 and UWin-NT 1.6, 1.68. The scripts were written from
scratch; they contain no viruses, worms, Trojan horses, trapdoors, etc. The
PUSE is Y2K compliant.
Principles
of system administration - Table of Contents
USAIL can be freely mirrored. A very useful resource...
[April 21, 1999] Linux
Administration Made Easy by Steve Frampton, <3srf@qlink.queensu.ca>
v0.99u.01 (PRE-RELEASE), 21 April 1999. A new LDP book.
The Network Administrators' Guide
by Olaf Kirk
Seven Sisters ;-)
Search engines:
Professional societies:
Portals and collections of links
Russian
[Jul 13, 2001] Duct Tape and Design: Applying Extreme Programming to System
Administration By
Pat Eyler. Article is provided courtesy of
New Riders.
Lately I've been reading a lot about extreme programming,
often abbreviated XP (see http://www.extreme programming
for more details). I like what I've been reading and I'd like to
start using the ideas, but I'm a sys admin, not a developer. Do
the ideas work in my domain? I think they do. In this article
I'll lay out the basic tenets of XP, look at how the practices
might fit into system administration, and discuss some possible
problems.
XP seems to affect people rather strongly. They either love
it or hate it. If you hate XP, don't stop reading here. I'm not
advocating system administration Wild West style; then again, XP
doesn't advocate cowboy coders either. There seem to be many
ideas in XP that would do quite well in improving the work of
many sys admins.
If you do like XP, you shouldn't stop here either.
At the core of XP is the idea that there are some rules that
lead to better, more efficient code. If these rules work better,
why not do them all, all the time, all the way? XP isn't about
hanging off a sheer rock wall—it's about doing things extremely
well.
This central theme expresses itself in four core values:
- Communication. If the developers and their
customers aren't talking, problems will come up quickly and
often.
- Simplicity. "Do the simplest thing that could
possibly work." The simpler your code, the less likely it is
to break.
- Feedback. Use frequent feedback to steer your
work.
- Courage. You need to have the courage to do what
needs to be done. Inaction can be just as bad as the wrong
action.
To keep the four values going, XP uses a set of twelve
practices for the developer. Every programmer on the team should
be using all of these practices throughout the life of the
project. Keeping all of the knobs cranked is what XP is all
about.
- The planning game. One of the biggest complaints
about XP is that it throws design out the window. This isn't
really true. XP relies on a rough sketch of the overall
shape with frequent short-term planning sessions to keep
everything moving in the right direction.
- Testing. Before any new code is written, a test
should exist to ensure that the code works correctly. Before
any project is declared complete, it has to meet all
acceptance tests as well. The combination of constant
(automated) unit testing and frequent acceptance testing
helps to ensure a quality product.
- Pair programming. Pairs of programmers write all
the production code. One developer is responsible for the
tactical end of things (getting compilable, correct code
written). The other is the strategist and makes sure that
the long-term impact of the code is in sync with what the
project needs.
- Refactoring. This is often termed "refactor
mercilessly." Consistent cleaning and improvement of the
code makes it easier to maintain and extend. Unit testing
and pair programming help ensure that refactored code
doesn't break existing functionality.
- Simple design. Don't write functionality into a
program where it isn't needed. Because you're refactoring
code regularly (and because you unit-test everything all the
time), adding functionality later is easier. When you find
out you need something, you'll know just what to add.
- Collective code ownership. Each member on the
team should know enough about the system to make any needed
changes, and should have the authority to do so.
- Continuous integration. After each new bit of
functionality is added by a pair of programmers, it should
be tested and integrated back into the main tree. If
everything is tested before it's integrated, you rarely need
to worry about the system breaking. If integration happens
often, no one is surprised by changes.
- On-site customer. Having the customer right there
allows minor course corrections to happen in near real-time.
Without it, development is slowed while programmers wait for
feedback.
- Small releases. Releases should be as small as
possible while still doing something valid. Many projects
shoot for a two-week release cycle.
- 40-hour week. If you work too many hours for too
many days, you'll burn out. Stay away from "death marches."
- Coding standards. If everyone is using the same
coding style, it's easier to refactor, the code is easier to
understand, and it's easier to switch partners as you move
along.
- Metaphor. Everyone working on a project needs to
understand how it all fits together.
This is a very short description of XP. To really understand
it, you probably need to take a look at some of the sites listed
down in the "Resources" section of this article. Hopefully,
you've got enough information to look at XP through a sys
admin's glasses.
Extreme System Administration
Okay, so system administration is less like traditional
development and more like duct taping things. Does this mean we
shouldn't design things? Or that we should run from fire to fire
putting out flames? I don't think so. If we spend our time
making sure that our work is done right the first time, we'll
all be better off.
I think this is where XP can come in. Some of the XP
practices seem to fit right into system administration.
Certainly, the ideas of maintainable code (and configurations),
common ownership, and clean design are laudable goals for anyone
dealing with computers. But how do the practices work for a sys
admin?
Collective code ownership, simple design,
40-hour weeks, and coding standards all seem to fit
without a great deal of fuss and bother. Recognize that
configuration files are just another body of code, and the fit
is even better.
The planning game is a bit more of a stretch. Every
sys admin has a wide and varied set of customers, and not all of
them agree on what needs to be done. It's important to work in
light of the basic needs of customers, though. Talking with them
about the end results of your work and developing plans in
concert with them will help ensure that you're on track with
what needs to happen.
Building a body of tests for your network and/or system(s)
allows you to make changes in a controlled fashion. Testing
gives you the reassurance that everything is as it should be.
Refactoring should be a part of every sys admin's
toolkit. If you can consistently simplify and/or improve your
systems, they become easier to maintain. You can refactor
configuration files. You can refactor crontabs, scripts, and
even your architecture. Just make sure that you can test
everything to verify that you haven't broken anything.
Having an on-site customer allows you to check the
impact of changes you want to make, verify solutions you've
implemented, and better foresee needs that will come up. Some
methods of bringing your customers on site include email lists,
a users group, and just walking around to talk to people.
Small releases allow you to put a change into place
incrementally. Making changes slowly lets you back out problems
quickly. You can work with greater confidence because you're
doing fewer things at any given time.
Metaphor (understanding the whole system) allows each
member of the sys admin team to respond quickly to problems. It
also allows you to describe proposed changes more readily, and
understand the potential effects of user requests.
Caveat Admin
Some aspects of XP don't seem to fit completely into the
world of system administration. The most difficult seems to be
pair programming. While pair programming might not be a
viable option for most sys admins, the ideas underlying it fit
very well. Another pair of knowledgeable eyes to look over
plans, configuration files, scripts, and other products of our
craft can be a boon. (I've had more than a few brainos caught by
coworkers.)
I think wholesale adoption of XP into system administration
probably isn't the way to go. Reading up on the methodology and
stealing the concepts that work seems a much better way to add
XP to your daily regimen.
Anyone want to pair up to go clean up sendmail.cf?
Resources
The FreeBSD
Diary -- System tools - toys I have found -- short discussion of last,
swapinfo, systat, tops and z-tools.
Tom Limoncelli's
Published Papers
Internet Requests for Comments (RFC)
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June 04, 2006
