An Introduction

[Paul Schulz]

Greetings,

I am new to ubuntu-server, but have been using Ubuntu for a while on
the desktop. (I am an active member of Australian Team and the Bug
Squad).

I am also a linux system administrator and would like to help in
making ubuntu-server suitable for my needs. (We are currently using
another Linux distribution, which may or may not meet our requirements
in the future.).

Some of the issues and opportunities that I would like to discusss
(off the top of my head).
These could form the start of various Ubuntu 'specifications'.
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- High Availability (HA) - http://www.linux-ha.org/

Service failover on the existing HA linux solution was working OK,
except where the load on two machine was two great for a single
machine, and a machine in the cluster failed. This led to an
'interesting' ping pong effect on servers until the external load
reduces to allow both machine to be restarted together.

HA uses it's own 'init' type system for starting and stopping
services, and it would be good to integrate this with the new
'Startup' scheme in edgy somehow.

There might also be other altenatives to creating systems that have
24x7 uptimes.

- Server Installation and management

I need to manage the software configuration on numerious servers, both
local and remote. Should a machine fail, a replacement may need to be
installed and configured in it's place in quick time (a setup time of
under 30 minutes could be expected).

[What is the shortest installation time for a reasonable spec'ed
server that people here have been able to achieve?]

Once a machine has been configured and commissioned, it should be
possible to 'backup' it's configuration and restore on bare metal
automatically. (Restoring data is different of course.)

- Uniform service names

This last one isn't directly related, except being an idea that I
haven't seen mentioned elsewhere... I use 'debcache' as the host name
for a local network 'apt-cacher' server. This means that I don't need
to change '/apt/sources.list' on my laptop, and it is automatically
directed to the local network 'apt-cacher' server whenever I need to
install something.
(DNS lookup on aptcacher.<localnetwork> return the local IP address of
the server.)

This means I don't have make any changes to this configuration,
whether I'm using it at home or in the office (which both have this
servicer running).

It would be handy to have a default list of service names which could
assist in rolling out multi-machine installations in addition to the
ones that people are familar with, like www, mail.  eg. ldap, syslog,
radio, mythtvserver.

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Thank you for you time..
Regards,
Paul Schulz