Re: [CentOS-virt] virtual sprawl - managing password changes

2008-05-16 Thread Luke S Crawford
"Jeff Larsen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I'm wondering how the rest of the community is managing updates of
> root (and other local account) passwords in a virtual sprawl
> environment (or a physical environment with lots of hosts).

> I have read about things like expect, puttycs, centralize with kerberos, etc.

the way I've seen it done at every large installation I've worked is
some sort of auto-pushed password files for authorization, but no valid 
passwords in the  password file (except for root as explained below)   the 
authentication is either handled with ssh public keys (authorized_keys files 
distributed via rsync or NFS) or with kerberos.  I like kerberos, personally, 
but the ssh authorized_keys setup is harder to screw up, and it works
fine as well. 

As for the root password,  the best practice is to make it so that the root
password is *only* useful once you have console.  (Of course we have all
disabled remote root login with password long ago-  disable su and prune
/etc/securetty - force your SysAdmins to use ksu or sudo instead of su if
they log in remotely, and log.)  -  if you do this correctly, the root 
password becomes much less sensitive,  and you can keep it in the password 
files you rsync around.  

I worked at one place that used  the rsync of the password file and 
~user/.ssh/authorized_keys setup  that had tens of thousands of servers.
the copy became a bit more complicated than just an rsync, but the system
did scale.  
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Re: [CentOS-virt] virtual sprawl - managing password changes

2008-05-16 Thread Mark Foster

Jeff Larsen wrote:

We are using the free VMware Server on CentOS 4. Almost all of our VMs
are CentOS 4 as well. We have 7 VMware hosts with about 40 total
virtual machines. It's been a very successful architecture for us.

I'm wondering how the rest of the community is managing updates of
root (and other local account) passwords in a virtual sprawl
environment (or a physical environment with lots of hosts).

I have read about things like expect, puttycs, centralize with kerberos, etc.

But I'm not looking for "options" here, I want to hear actual
experiences! What has worked for you, what hasn't worked? Or do you
feel that the chance for failure is to great and the results too
catastrophic?
  
Puppet can control user attributes like passwords quite easily, provided 
you set it up right.

http://www.reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetRedHatCentos

CFengine can as well but not so elegantly as puppet which implements a 
provider model (users, group, packages, cronjobs etc)


--
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints...
Mark D. Foster, CISSP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  http://mark.foster.cc/


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Re: [CentOS-virt] virtual sprawl - managing password changes

2008-05-16 Thread Eli Stair


Theres nothing unique about VM's vs. standard machine deployments, you're 
looking at a standard UNIX admin practice.  I personally run cfengine for 
maintaining everything configuration-related across all *NIX'es, and 
LDAP/kerberos (via AD) for all non-root logins, across our entire enterprise. 
There are numerous ways to achieve "it" with varying levels of security, work, 
and knowledge required, but at the _simplest_ you could just maintain 
passwd/shadow/group/etc users via cfengine, or set up a basic NIS deployment 
for users (more trivial and easy to pick up than LDAP/.


The topic is more general than Centos/Xen, and you have an entire world of 
options in reality.  Pick one that you're comfortable with and meets your needs 
after asking (which you are).  If you ask a wide enough audience, you'll 
inevitably get pros/cons for each and every method, thus the requirement for 
you to do the research into them after.


So to answer as it sounds you want, I've been immensely happy with cfengine for 
handling anything you can conceive of as an administrator.  If you can do 
something from a shell, you can do it with cfengine in a very complex manner. 
For authentication, I actually recommend Active Directory, the ONLY microsoft 
product I recommend.  Unfortunately they don't have a Linux package :)


Cheers,

/eli

Jeff Larsen wrote:

We are using the free VMware Server on CentOS 4. Almost all of our VMs
are CentOS 4 as well. We have 7 VMware hosts with about 40 total
virtual machines. It's been a very successful architecture for us.

I'm wondering how the rest of the community is managing updates of
root (and other local account) passwords in a virtual sprawl
environment (or a physical environment with lots of hosts).

I have read about things like expect, puttycs, centralize with kerberos, 
etc.


But I'm not looking for "options" here, I want to hear actual
experiences! What has worked for you, what hasn't worked? Or do you
feel that the chance for failure is to great and the results too
catastrophic?

Thanks,

--
Jeff
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[CentOS-virt] virtual sprawl - managing password changes

2008-05-16 Thread Jeff Larsen
We are using the free VMware Server on CentOS 4. Almost all of our VMs
are CentOS 4 as well. We have 7 VMware hosts with about 40 total
virtual machines. It's been a very successful architecture for us.

I'm wondering how the rest of the community is managing updates of
root (and other local account) passwords in a virtual sprawl
environment (or a physical environment with lots of hosts).

I have read about things like expect, puttycs, centralize with kerberos, etc.

But I'm not looking for "options" here, I want to hear actual
experiences! What has worked for you, what hasn't worked? Or do you
feel that the chance for failure is to great and the results too
catastrophic?

Thanks,

-- 
Jeff
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[CentOS-virt] Virtual Iron

2008-05-16 Thread Karanbir Singh

Guys FYI,

A couple of people from VirtualIron got in touch with me following on 
from the flexiscale donation (we have a few i386/x86_64 VM's hosted 
there, we == CentOS Project, that the QA guys are looking at using to do 
some of their work in )


Over the next few days, the Virtual Iron guys will prolly touch base 
with this list and see how the centos project might be able to work with 
them on varios centos specific things.


- KB
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[CentOS-virt] xm new

2008-05-16 Thread David Hláčik
Hello, i have Centos5.1 64bit, with xen3.2, using centos xen kernel, xen3.2
builded from source rpm for centos.

Virtual machines work fine trough xm create configname ,but when i am trying
to add them to xen source :

xm new configname, this is what i get :

[EMAIL PROTECTED] xen]# xm new test01.hvm
Unexpected error: exceptions.ImportError
Please report to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/xm", line 10, in ?
main.main(sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 2531, in
main
_, rc = _run_cmd(cmd, cmd_name, args)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 2555, in
_run_cmd
return True, cmd(args)
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/xen/xm/main.py", line 1308, in
xm_importcommand
cmd = __import__(command, globals(), locals(), 'xen.xm')
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/xen/xm/new.py", line 26, in ?
from xen.xm.xenapi_create import *
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/xen/xm/xenapi_create.py", line
23, in ?
from xml.parsers.xmlproc import xmlproc, xmlval, xmldtd
ImportError: No module named xmlproc

Thanks in advance!

D.
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