Hi Mike! thanks for your interest! Brief reply as I am dealing with some RL things that are keeping me away from computers.
We definitely need a config mgmt scheme. We need one that is pull-based, however, where each XS ("configuration client") requests updates from the "configuration server". - pull scales much much better - many (most!) XSs will be behind NAT and weird network setups that the deployment sometimes does not control (sp in the case of satellite connections) - so proto must be something super-standard that is always allowed through: HTTP - it must also work for XSs without internet -- by carrying the same config messages on a usb stick My preferred approach is to use the techniques outlined in http://www.infrastructures.org/ -- something like a much-simplified isconf (taking advantge of the fact that we are in an rpm'd world, and we have good "storage" engines like git) with a strong focus on atomicity. cfengine is, afaik, a push-based framework (if you use it as the documentation suggests) -- some of the tools in cfengine are useful however. Some people have mentioned puppet but I haven't had a chance to explore it. Most of these tools are designed and used mainly in a controlled server room. We have the opposite use case -- our servers may very well lose power in the middle of a config update. ;-) Do you think cfengine can be used in a pure pull model, using http or text files (+rpms or whatever files are needed) in a mountpoint? cheers, m On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Mike Dawson <mikeofmanches...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > Greetz from Kabul. We have a very exciting upcoming deployment to > Kandahar coming up and hopefully many more deployments :) > > There are two main things that caught my eye for trying to integrate > into XS (and I'm willing to put in development time / expertise as > well :) ): > > 1. Adopting cfengine as part of the package so that one can easily set > a master policy and have all the school servers across the country > follow. I use this in our office at the moment and have been thinking > about using this to make the deployment easier to manage. This way we > can actively push out updates to the clients and it gives us a toolkit > to say what to update, when etc. (e.g. can manage the OS image > updates, activity updates, etc) > > 2. Trying to a little bit deskill / make easier the installation of > school servers. We have made a pure wireless deployment system using > Freifunk / mesh networking between routers to form a wireless > backbone. That way just bang the box on the all and all should be > well. I'm wondering what it would take to make a web control panel > kind of interface to the school server. This would make it easier to > checkin on the school server remotely (e.g. GPRS / VPN link stuff), > and generally increase the pool of people who would then be > 'administrators'. > > I have made some cron job based tools for doing that before. This > would be non resident and run only when changes have been made to the > config that require it to be run. SME Server had a nice model for > this. > > 3. If possible / our development time allows I would love to put in > Nagios so that we can get some accurate reporting of uptime of routers > in the classroom etc. > > If we had that then I could make some standard OS images for the type > of hardware that we have plus a setup wizard that would make it a > point click, boot matter to install a school server. For those > without connectivity I think we could make a key based system so that > if the 'roaming update netbook' comes onto the school server network > on a reserved address that it could respect this as it's cfengine > master and then follow the orders. > > What are the requirements for this to become part of the main XS > build? That really is the sustainability that we need... > > Thanks/Regards, > > -Mike > _______________________________________________ > Server-devel mailing list > Server-devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel > -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel