Large Enterprise Unix administration

“it is better to solve the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way”.

Since we could find little prior art, we set out to create it. Over the course of several years of deploying, reworking, and administering large mission-critical infrastructures, we developed a certain methodology and toolset. We began thinking of an entire infrastructure as one large enterprise cluster, rather than as a collection of individual hosts. This change of perspective, and the decisions it invoked, made a world of difference in cost and ease of administration. The standard functionality includes:

• Remote management
• Secure communications
• Distributed Monitoring
• Unattended network-based installation
• Automatic host administration (no need to manually track or apply changes to managed hosts)
• Unified server patching
• Library of Installation Scripts
• Single Signon
• Continuous, long-term live host management (no re-installation needed to apply upgrades)
• Ordered, validated changes to any given host
• Prototype and class-based host definitions
• A coherent framework for managing all of the above

There is relatively little prior art in print which addresses the problems of large Unix  infrastructures in any holistic sense. Thanks to the work of many dedicated people we now see extensive coverage of individual tools, techniques, and policies [nemeth] [frisch] [stern] [dns] [evard] [limoncelli] [anderson] . But it is difficult in practice to find  the best way

We recognize that there really is no "standard" way to assemble or manage large infrastructures of UNIX machines. While the components that make up a typical infrastructure are generally well-known, professional infrastructure architects tend to use those components in radically different ways to accomplish the same ends. In the process, we usually write a great deal of code to glue those components together, duplicating each others' work in incompatible ways.

Because infrastructures are usually ad hoc, setting up a new infrastructure or attempting to harness an existing unruly infrastructure can be bewildering for new sysadmins. The sequence of steps needed to develop a comprehensive infrastructure is relatively straightforward, but the discovery of that sequence can be time-consuming and fraught with error. Moreover, mistakes made in the early stages of setup or migration can be difficult to remove for the lifetime of the infrastructure.

We will discuss the sequence that we developed and offer a brief glimpse into a few of the many tools and techniques this perspective generated. If nothing else, we hope to provide a lightning rod for future discussion. We operate a web site (www.infrastructures.org) and mailing list for collaborative evolution of infrastructure designs. Many of the details missing from this document should show up on the web site.

In our search for answers, we were heavily influenced by the MIT Athena project [athena] , the OSF Distributed Computing Environment [dce] , and by work done at Carnegie Mellon University [sup] [afs] and the National Institute of Standards and Technology [depot]

This is a fitting definition of a system administrator - making repairs, dealing with people, and trying to anticipate as well as prevent problems.

An experienced admin is not necessarily a good admin

The best admin is the person with the right mindset, not the person with the most time on the job. In fact, the more "indispensable" an admin seems to be, the more likely they are a bad admin. The dead giveaway is if the person needs to be around to answer questions all the time, which strongly suggests two things:

1. That the documentation is incomplete

   Complete network, host and application documentation is must for every site. If an admin is constantly called while on vacation or while others are on call is probably not documenting their systems properly. Everything needed to understand and fix problems at their site should be clearly documented in a central location.
    

2. That the systems aren't discoverable

   The systems should be as self-documenting as possible. This means that start/stop/reload scripts should be in conventional locations (like /etc/init.d/ on SysV and on most Linuxes), MOTD messages should give helpful info, scripts should have comments explaining their usage and purpose, and automated alerts should send useful information about the error condition(s) found. Leave nothing to be rediscovered every time someone new has to work on the systems, let them spend their time working on the actual issue(s) at hand.

   An admin unfamiliar with the machine(s) in question should be able to find their way around the system with a minimum of trouble.

Many admins become mired in their site's problems, and stop trying to improve their situation. They accept that their disks keep filling up, that their applications keep dying, and that mundane tasks take up all their time.

If they were to write cron jobs to trim files that grow until filesystems fill, restart dead applications with init or cfengine or cron scripts or daemontools, and automate repetitive tasks from cron or cfengine, they would have a smooth running network. Once things run smoothly, they can spend their time updating software, improving security, or any of the many projects that improve overall conditions. Such projects get little effort spent on them at sites without a proactive attitude.

Recommended Links

• Infrastructures.Org Best Practices in Automated Systems Administration and Infrastructure Architecture Gold Server
   
• Introduction to the Scientific Method
• system administration research - Part 3: Challenges to System Administrators by Mark Burgess
• SAGE Web resources for sysadmins
• troubleshooting is mentioned in this part of a sysadmin course (also by Mark Burgess)
• sysadmin troubleshooting white paper
• Slow Systems Administration (by Sandra Henry-Stocker)
• Stop your fire-fighting, Part 1
• The Unofficial Unix Administration Horror Story Summary, version 1.1
• The Great Solaris Administration Best Practices Debate
• The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison Wesley)
• Deconstructing User Requests and the Nine Step Model, Thomas A. Limoncelli
• Principles of Network and System Administration (Wiley & Sons, by Burgess)
• The OSS Trouble Ticket API will provide interfaces for creating, querying, updating, and deleting trouble tickets (trouble reports).

   

• Depot: A Framework for Sharing Software Installation Across Organizational and UNIX Platform Boundaries
• Cfengine, the configuration engine
• Infrastructures.Org: Best Practices in Automated Systems Administration and Infrastructure Architecture
• Unix System Administration Ring

MRINetwork.com Warning: Social Networking Can Be Hazardous to Your Job Search

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Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: June 06, 2011