-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Sean Cook wrote: | I am looking for a good starting point to learning how to manage groups | of machines. We have around a dozen or so machines most of them running | Fedora Core 2. Because of stability issues that I have run into I am | trying to come up with a migration plan to gentoo. My fear is that | administration of these machine will quickly get out of hand. | | I have heard of ways to more easily manage large numbers of machines and | am looking for a nudge in the right direction. | | thank you. | | Regards, | | Sean | | -- | gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list |
Some tips for saving yourself time doing repetitive things:
1. Build a centralized loghost. This is pretty easy to do with syslog-ng. Having all the pertinent logs for all your hosts available on one machine will save you bunches of time down the road from not having to log into each machine individually just to check up on it.
2. Install logwatch or some other logfile-parsing program. If you miss something throughout the day, at least logwatch will email you each night to alert you to some issues and such.
3. You also might want to look into setting up hostkey-auth-based logins between the machines...I'd use one machine as your trusted host, and set the other machines to only allow ssh from that one machine. You'll limit the number of open ssh ports on your network to the outside world, but you also have that single point of failure that can ruin a weekend if it goes down. Hostkey-auth is more secure than password-auth in ssh, but if your one trusted host gets exploited, then it's easier for them to get into your other machines...It's got some plus and some minus, but I think it's worth it.
There's my 2cents for now. Good luck. :-) - -Dan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFCLMSOnURHNoE9YE4RAocOAJ48DmP+f7fN6iYwcFr7Oj7QUPDHvQCgxw46 J/vNj/VS74lAnyzVWA/I9PI= =srk+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
