An Introduction

[Achim Bohnet]

On Saturday 14 October 2006 11:01, Paul Schulz wrote:
> 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'.
> ----
> - 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).

I use fai pkg to install all desktop system here, and I'm now starting
to convert the servers installion to use it.

For more info see: http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/

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

For servers here installation time is greatly influenced by
mkfs time.  I remember 1046 sec for a AFS fileserver setup,
but I don't remember if it was with or without mkfs for 1,5 TB
of disks.  One get's quickly used to just PXE boot, work on
something else and return to the installed client when time
permits.

> 
> 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.)

With FAI you can either keep the config tree under a revision control
system, or direct FAI installation to grab config from an svn server
directly during installation.  So no config to backup after installation.
FAI (fully automatic installation) implies that you had everything
before you did the installation.

Achim
> 
> - 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.
> 
> ----
> Thank you for you time..
> Regards,
> Paul Schulz
> 
> -- 
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> ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server
> 
> 

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