Slashdot Mirror

Can't you work it out?

Hint

http://bluemaster.iu.hio.no/edu/dark/lin-asm/syscalls.html

Have you looked at Cfengine?http://www.iu.hio.no/cfengine/
I believe this can be relevant for you.

If Linux distros could offer a consistent config file format (Pick one. Seriously.), some form of config inheritance (eg load /etc/defaults/[someconfig], then /home/username/.config/[someconfig], then /etc/overrides/[someconfig]) and lockdown (think KDE's kiosk), that would help a lot. Yes, I understand that this is almost impossible given the nature of Linux distros as assemblies of independenly developed software, but nonetheless this would be awfully nice.

cfengine

LSB

If Linux distros could offer a consistent config file format (Pick one. Seriously.), some form of config inheritance (eg load /etc/defaults/[someconfig], then /home/username/.config/[someconfig], then /etc/overrides/[someconfig]) and lockdown (think KDE's kiosk), that would help a lot. Yes, I understand that this is almost impossible given the nature of Linux distros as assemblies of independenly developed software, but nonetheless this would be awfully nice.

cfengine

LSB

cfg2html - to have hardcopy of configurations
http://www.cfg2html.com/

cfengine - to ease management of multiple systems
http://www.iu.hio.no/cfengine/

Ganglia Monitoring Core and Web Frontend - makes it easy to check the status of many systems at once, even in non-clustered environments
http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/

One aspect of this discussion that Landsburg does not touch upon is the theory, influenced by biological immunology, that computer vandalism such as writing an Internet worm contributes positively to the Internet's collective resistance to more targeted forms of computer crime, hacking into personal computers in order to perform fraudulent online banking transactions, for example. How could we measure the positive economic value of malware authoring in terms of it's net impact (if any) on reducing the net impact of computer crime? While this question will likely remain unanswered, I doubt we will identify a prosocial angle on murder.

• Autotools -- autoconf, automake
• pkgsrc
• cfengine

The original poster has obviously never dealt with any number of machines. Building from source (with or without a package/ports system) is great fun for a single user systm. Once you get to multiple multi-user systems, it's just not worth the trouble to optimize one program by 5% when nobody ever cares about speed, just that they deleted an important email they've had sitting on the server for the last 18mo and never bothered reading.

For some things, building from source is unescapable, but with a large number of systems what you want is something that can easily be done itendically to any number of systems with little to no effort.

Right now, at work, we're trying to transition over to a system that uses Debian with FAI to do roll-outs/reimages and Cfengine to handle updates & other administrative changes (all the while, putting config files in CVS). About the only thing that's going to be custom compiled is going to be our kernel and we're only doing that 'cuz we like some custom patches applied to it.

If you're looking to automate administration tasks, might I suggest you take a look at cfengine?

Cfengine, or the configuration engine is an autonomous agent and a middle to high level policy language for building expert systems which administrate and configure large computer networks. Cfengine uses the idea of classes and a primitive intelligence to define and automate the configuration and maintenance of system state, for small to huge configurations. Cfengine is designed to be a part of a computer immune system, and can be thought of as a gaming agent. It is ideal for cluster management and has been adopted for use all over the world in small and huge organizations alike.

More than $7 million to install FreeBSD on 10,000 boxes using something like cfengine? Seriously?

I think that we should want only ONE repository of information about each computer. I think that, philosophically, a repository should not be anything else than a repository. We don't want the database of information to go out and start changing things. We don't want this because of a realization that the program that takes action based on information should be different than the program that contains the information.

Sure, but Ganymede actually is designed to actively respond to data loaded into it. If you want a simple repository, you want something like MySQL, or PostgresSQL, or a simple LDAP server.

For software distribution and management, tools like apt-get or rpm, when combined with something like cfengine or OpenNMS might make better sense, I would think.

I think modesty is fine, but not when it becomes misleading. The facts seem to be that Ganymede is an excellent start on something that needs to be everywhere.

Well, I'm pleased that you have a high opinion of Ganymede, and I certainly wouldn't want to discourage anyone from making a go of building something like what you are suggesting based on it, but as I say, it's not really what I was designing for.

If you'd like to throw ideas of this kind around, by all means, send email to the Ganymede-dev mailing list and see if you can find someone else who's interested in pursuing this sort of thing. If nothing else, it would be more appropriate for me to respond in depth there.

Sounds like someone at IBM just read a load of Mark Burgess papers and found their next marketing angle. Interesting that one of their ideas for "autonomic" optimisation is for the system to clone and run several OS images...just like recent AS/400 models can do! These and other great ideas coming soon from an (IBM) mainframe near you! Presumably they'll be open sourcing all their mainframe technology so that the effort isn't impeded by "proprietary standards"?

Cynicism apart, it's a laudable initiative if it results in a large kick to existing research in these areas. SAGE are also turning their attention to the process of automating and scaling system administration tasks (see recent discussion on sysadmin "research" on sage-members list).

OTOH, I can think of a large part of the IT industry - those vendors with profitable integration services business units - who possibly won't be throwing their lot in with IBM on this one.

Ade_
/

Here is a link to a page that discusses what SSL is and gives step-by-step instructions on how to create and sign your own SSL certificate.