Eystein Måløy Stenberg wrote:
I would like to ask for your experiences when it comes to bringing a
server from bare metal to production-ready. From talking to people, it
seems like there are many ways this is done.
By way of context, I run a small server farm (4 servers), so usually not
a big issue. All running Xen w/ Debian Dom0, mostly Xen DomUs.
I assume you are using network-booting to kick things off?
The two older servers, boot off of either a CD/DVD or a USB stick. The
two newer servers don't have CD slots, so I netboot them. VMs I use
debootstrap to set up.
Are you just provisioning one operating system? If not, how do you
make the selection between multiple OSes? Is this fully automated
(e.g. using mac-addresses)? Is this important to you, or do you
provision the same OS >90% of the time?
As above, mostly Debian.
Do you have a separate environment where you do your provisioning? How
do you move between the provisioning environment and the production
environment?
Just boot the machine, install, provisioning->production is a matter of
setting up VMs, migrating them around, turning services on/off.
One option I've seen is physically replugging the server to separate
production from PXE environment. Is there a more automated way to do
this? One problem I can see for automation is that the PXE booting
relies on DHCP, and you don't want multiple DHCP servers (production
vs. PXE environment). What about relying on static IPs for production
servers, and only using DHCP for new servers?
All static IPs. Initial boot via PXE has a mac->IP binding in the boot
config. After that, local config files.
Finally, what are your biggest problems with your setup (if any)? How
could you save more time and make it easier? Do you have thoughts or
plans for the future?
I keep meaning to automate a bit. But with only a small number of
servers I find paper notes (well, MSWord actually) and ssh to be as easy
as anything. Cutting and pasting snips of bash commands from a word
window into an SSH window works as well as anything.
I really appreciate any experiences you would like to share on this
topic.
I'm kind of curious myself :-)
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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