Google Gets Slack with Software Updates

An anonymous reader writes "While Google's open source project titled 'Slack' was released over a year ago, last week's Australian Unix Users Group Conference marks the first time that Google has ever discussed the system in public. Corporate systems administrator Michael Still helped to illuminate a little bit about how Google uses Slack and how their network of computers fits together. From the article: '"Slack is a source deployment system and it's the way we install applications on servers," Still said, adding Slack is based around a centralized configuration repository which is then deployed onto selected machines in a "pull" method. Each of the "worker" machines asks for its new configuration regularly or when a manual command is run.'"

Comments

Here's the source code

[Benley]

Before anybody says "Hey! Where's the source?!", let me just provide a link right now:

http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/

Do me a favor and don't destroy sundell's server, or he's likely to hurt me :-P

Sounds similar to our setup

[nsanders]

We run Ubuntu in my department and ended up building an in-house Apt repository/svn/rsync system to maintain all our machines. We also use custom scripts that monitor NFS shares to emergency push operations. Obviously our down side is that an entire .deb package must be rebuilt for each change, but it's nice to see Google's method isn't out of this world after all.

Coral Cache

[dch24]

I doubt it will get too slashdotted, but just in case, this is the link with the downloads coming from coral cache:

Index of /~alan/projects/slack

[TXT] COPYING 13-Oct-2006 00:09 1k
[TXT] ChangeLog 13-Oct-2006 00:09 7k
[ ] slack-0.13.1.tar.gz 08-Jan-2005 20:01 28k
[ ] slack-0.13.2.tar.gz 09-Feb-2005 11:27 28k
[ ] slack-0.14.0.tar.gz 13-Oct-2006 00:09 47k

Short Description:

slack is a configuration management system designed to appeal to lazy
admins (like me). It's an evolution from the usual "put files in some
central directory" that is faily common practice. It's descended from an
earlier system I also wrote, called "subsets", and uses a multi-stage
rsync to fix some of the problems I had there.

Basically, it's a glorified wrapper around rsync.

License:
See the file COPYING.

Getting slack:
http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/

Documentation:
Not much, but there's some in doc/

Reporting problems:
Send an email to <sundell (at gmail.com)>. Probably want to put
"slack" in the subject and be patient for replies. :)

$Id: README,v 1.5 2006/09/25 21:35:22 alan Exp $

Re:Confusing title?

[ardran]

FWIW, the name is an acronym: SLACK - Sysadmins' Lazy Auto-Configuration Kit

I knew it!

[Rachel Lucid]

The SubGenius must have slack.
Google makes Slack.
Ergo,
Google is the corporate incarnation of 'Bob'!

... What? Someone had to say it!

Not new

[HavokDevNull]

Sounds very much like CFEngine http://www.cfengine.org/ with subversion?

Re:Kinda similar to APT

[nsanders]

Some what. We use APT here in our department. One of the big changes from SLACK is that it doesn't require you to compile packages like RPMs or DEBs. We have a couple of very large applications that take up 1-3GB and it takes a very long time to rebuild the packages. Slack negates such a need.

Re:So its part of the Active Directory for Unix

[Zombie Ryushu]

You mean OpenLDAP, Samba, Kerberos, Bind.
I can give you one better.

I use Mandriva Linux as my Domain Controllers and workstations.

With urpmi's parallel operation with SSH support is a Godsend. See my Secure Shell server is GSSAPI enabled (Kerberos.) Because of the fact every machine is authorized by LDAP, and authenticated by Kerberos, I can do this:

urpmi samba-server --auto --parallel dcs

This will install Samba on all Domain Controllers

urpmi gnumeric --auto --parallel all

This will install gnumeric on every machine in my Domain.

urpmi.update -a
urpmi --auto --auto-select --parallel all

This will update every machine I have in my Domain while resolving dependancies. There are problems with doing it this way. The big one is, under AD, updates can be pushed to offline machines. For this to work, all machiess must be online.

Also this does not update the urpmi catalogue synthesis.

It may be an homage, true

[mister_jpeg]

Or maybe the googadmins have a sense of humor.

Naming an automated package management/software update system after Slackware? That's cute.

CFengine

[Pegasus]

How exactly does this compare to CFengine? From the short slack description it would seem like cfengine is a much more mature solution ...