Open Source Tools in Data Centers

An anonymous reader writes "There is a nice presentation on the L.A.S. Linux site entitled "Managing Data Center Functions with Open Source Tools" which was presented at Comdex 2003. It covers everything from IPtables to OpenNMS. As well as covering some less known but nice tools like NeDi, which lets you easily manage Cisco routers and swiches from a web browser."

Comments

My favorite use of OS

[afidel]

in the enterprise datacenter has to be Cisco Enterprise Printing System of CEPS for short. With CEPS Cisco has over 10K printers in thousands of sites around the world with only 2 print admin's!! CEPS is based around SAMBA and CUPS and allows windows, linux, and unix clients to print to printers in a way that is unmatched for redundancy in any other product commercial or otherwise. Remote print servers can take over controll of print queues quickly in the event of a print server failure and queues can be rerouted to a new print device should a physical printer fail all without client reconfiguration! Cisco was nice enough to give the system back to the world. They have a sourceforge project available for anyone interested.

Missing software

[Anonymous Coward]

I would include Zabbix to the Monitoring and Administration section. This is out-of-the-box application that takes care of monitoring of our network consisting of more than 400 nodes. It is not as mature as Nagios or MRTG, but its stability and feature set makes it extremely useful. Native high-performance agents cover most of platforms: Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, MS WIN, Linux, *BSD, OS X. Could be installed in a 5 minutes, this is big advantage over Nagios or OpenNMS.

Re:Missing software

[Anonymous Coward]

He states in the article on the website 'Fear and Loathing at comdex 2003' that, "Being that there are so many tools that can fit into that catagory which are Open Source. I did my best to give a high level overview of what there is available and to mention the less known, but equally good tools available. So please don't send me hate mail as to why X, Y, or Z was not mentioned."

So with limited time he was only trying to give people unfamiliar with Open Source tools a tasting of what there is to offer. . .

HP OpenView

[topside420]

HP OpenView is what we use to manage thousands of network nodes/hubs. Everything is displayed in a hub/spoke fashion and it easily intigrates with all your equiptment using the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Not open source, however this tool would be easily adopted by any *nix lover. Everything is easily scriptable, and the GUI is based 100% off command-line apps. So, anything you can do in the GUI can be scripted and alarms can be HIGHLY customized, reports generated on site statistic, you can even view real-time graphs of performance, packet-rate, utilization, etc of any single interface, or multiple interfaces on the same graph.

Another tool of use is the Cisco Transport Controller...we use this to monitor a fiber network up in MA.

Re:HP OpenView

[RicoX9]

I have run both. I like NOT having to mortgage everything to buy the software, then finding out that to run it right, you need to sell your firstborn for the hardware to run it on. For the price of the Sun hardware you need to run OV, you could buy the x86 hardware to monitor and manage a LARGE network.

I used to work as an SE for Cisco, ran a mid-sized ISP's network, owned a computer store, and have run a couple of corporate networks(not bragging, just qualifying my experience, Cisco SE's are highly technical salespeople, some very good some bad). I was an Open Source advocate before I went in, and nothing I saw there changed my opinion. Open View, Cisco Works, etc can all be easily replaced by Open Source tools. These tools do the job as well or better for the cost of a few x86 boxes and your time.

The time factor is still there in the proprietary systems, as you have to learn, configure and maintain them just like the OS tools. There *are* situations where something like Open View is the solution. Probably 99% of the time, you're better off (or at least as good) using the OS tools and contributing back to the community.

I use Nagios, Netdisco, RANCID, and MRTG/RRDTool. I love these articles on Slashdot because I'm always finding links to new tools to try.

Re:vservers

[DDumitru]

Your definately want UML.

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net

UML has a number of differences when compared to chroot environments.

• Resource usage is higher because less is shared.
• Each virtual needs a real network, and usually a real public IP
• Network configuration can become nightmareish as the number of virtuals grows unless you write some signifigant config scripts that run dynamically.
• You really need a good understanding of networking and especially routing and how ARP works. The docs on the UML site are correct, but they only scratch the surface.
• You still have to secure the virtual on the host system. This usually involves running UML as non-root inside of a chroot jail that is as sparsly populated as possible.
• You will want the SKAS patch.
  • With the SKAS patch, you will need a /proc in your chroot jail. Look at mount --bind to just mount /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/mm

On the other hand, UML is good enough to fool even the hackers (I have had UMLs hacked and the hacker didn't realize they were in a virtual).

We run public webservers, and mailservers on UML. We are at the point where we just assume that you use one UML per application. The manageability of running single-application servers is just too good to pass up.

NMIS

[mikus]

I've been using NMIS (http://sins.com.au/nmis) for about 2 years and it's better than any commercial NMS I've seen and used. Even our management turned down the likes of OpenView and Patrol in favor of it (of course cost helped that as well :). It's got it quirks, and isn't very modular unless you know perl reasonable well, but oob in a cisco network it's great with support for other vendors slowly growing. The developers are supportive via their email list as well. If you're in the need of an monitoring platform and your PHB's aren't afraid of open source apps, NMIS should definately be given a look.

--mb

Re:Open source in the data center?

[El Cubano]

With all the recent security issues surrounding open source (Debian, anyone), I would think twice about using open source in my data center.

Please get a clue. The Debian compromise was because of a lost password. Every OS/App is equally vulnerabne to this.

When it comes to centralized management of your IT assets, Microsoft products are unbeatable. An excellent reason to be an MS only shop, IMHO.

Now I get it, you're trolling. MS may have some good tools, if you need point-and-drool and don't try to do anything the system or tool was not explicitly designed to do.

In my case, I admin a research lab with 12 workstations and two servers, all running GNU/Linux. I spend no more than 15 minutes per week on routine admin tasks, all of it from home. I can also remotely install any software the researchers need. The only reason I ever need to physically go there is to replenish the office supplies (toner, paper, bsank CDs). That sort of a setup would be difficult, if not impossible, with an MS-only setup.

Re:Samba is King of the Free Software World

[wfrp01]

The problem with NFS is that it presumes the clients are trusted. SMB is not the most secure network file system, but it's more secure than NFS, and ubiquitous. Perhaps the next version of NFS will be better in this regard, I'm not sure.

Re:Open Source

[protektor]

You might want to look at FreeVSD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/ ). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.

It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.

I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.

If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.

Re:OpenNMS v. Nagios

[Brian the Wise]

Greetings...

We started using Nagios just over a year ago as something quick and simple while we were building our infrastructure (was still beta in those days). It does the job if you have a small site, but does not scale well. We've just switched over to OpenNMS. It does take a lot more effort to configure and get up and running (especially as we're not running it on Linux), but it's worth it for the additional flexibility and features you get. It helps if you have someone who understands Java for the implimentation as the documentation is a LOT more incomplete than Nagios.

If you understand SNMP and systems monitoring and management then OpenNMS is for you. If not, then go for Nagios.

Re:vservers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you want vserver. It is more flexible and powerful than FreeBSD's jail and just as efficient (only a system call away).

http://vserver.strahlungsfrei.de/tiki-index.php
http://www.linux-vserver.org/
http://www.solucor p.qc.ca/miscprj/s_context.hc