Howdy, Thought I'd throw up a general question to everyone as to what they're using for deployment of linux, both OS and then software. We've got kickstart running here which is great for PXE booting the OS and some simple settings. What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? I've looked at spacewalk which seems to be a nice piece of software but I was wondering what everyone else is doing? There's a great paid software that I found but it's a tad on the expensive side, bonus is that it's multi-platform: http://www.filewave.com/en/home -TT Tom Taylor Engineer The Mill 451 Broadway, New York, 10013 +1 212 337 3210 www.themill.com www.twitter.com/MillChannel www.facebook.com/MillChannel Please consider the environment before printing this email. This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system. Please use the following link to view Mill Touch. http://www.themill.com/work/mill-touch/behind-the-scenes.aspx

Currently cfengine2 to keep machines in line and add new software (although a lot of our software is now just network installed). It works well and it's relatively simple. For initial deployment we also run pxe/kickstart and have a single call to cfengine in the %post% section that does everything needed to get a machine going. That said, we are looking at puppet (I don't have any useful opinions either way on it to share yet) simply because I've heard a lot of good things about it. -- Stephen Willey | Head of Systems T: +44 794 472 0543 E: stephen.willey@primefocusworld.com A: 2-4 Bucknall Street, London WC2H 8LA ________________________________________ From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com [studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com] on behalf of Tom Taylor [taylor@themill.com] Sent: 05 January 2012 18:34 To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: [SSA-Discuss] Mass linux deployment - OS and Software. Howdy, Thought I'd throw up a general question to everyone as to what they're using for deployment of linux, both OS and then software. We've got kickstart running here which is great for PXE booting the OS and some simple settings. What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? I've looked at spacewalk which seems to be a nice piece of software but I was wondering what everyone else is doing? There's a great paid software that I found but it's a tad on the expensive side, bonus is that it's multi-platform: http://www.filewave.com/en/home -TT Tom Taylor Engineer The Mill 451 Broadway, New York, 10013 +1 212 337 3210 www.themill.com www.twitter.com/MillChannel www.facebook.com/MillChannel Please consider the environment before printing this email. This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system. Please use the following link to view Mill Touch. http://www.themill.com/work/mill-touch/behind-the-scenes.aspx

On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Tom Taylor wrote: > What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? puttet, chef that should do it for you... Jok --- Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool... oo ,(..)\ ~~

cobbler and puppet work great On 5 January 2012 10:34, Tom Taylor wrote: > Howdy, > > Thought I'd throw up a general question to everyone as to what they're > using for deployment of linux, both OS and then software. > > We've got kickstart running here which is great for PXE booting the OS and > some simple settings. > > What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? > > I've looked at spacewalk which seems to be a nice piece of software but I > was wondering what everyone else is doing? > > There's a great paid software that I found but it's a tad on the expensive > side, bonus is that it's multi-platform: http://www.filewave.com/en/home > > -TT > > > > Tom Taylor > Engineer > > The Mill > 451 Broadway, New York, 10013 > +1 212 337 3210 > > www.themill.com > www.twitter.com/MillChannel > www.facebook.com/MillChannel > > Please consider the environment before printing this email. > This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system. > > Please use the following link to view Mill Touch. > http://www.themill.com/work/mill-touch/behind-the-scenes.aspx > >

Puppet is definitely the bomb here. To get up and running takes a little effort, but there are a great many modules out there that will speed up your deployment. We barely ever log into a server manually anymore, and I'm loving it :) Walter PS. Our puppet modules are here: https://github.com/tribily On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 20:08, epac wrote: > On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Tom Taylor wrote: > >> What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? > > > puttet, chef > > that should do it for you... > > Jok > > --- > Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool... >  oo > ,(..)\ >  ~~ -- Walter Heck -- Co-founder @ Tribily (http://tribily.com) In-depth Server Monitoring as a Service -- Follow @tribily on Twitter and/or 'Like' our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/tribily

I can recommend making the effort. We're slowly doing it and the quality of our modules improves enormously since we need to clean them up and make them totally environment agnostic before opensourcing them :) On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 20:47, Brent Hensarling wrote: > I have been thinking about putting our modules up on github myself ( they > need a bit more cleaning first). There is a ton of good modules and > manifests out there, but not much in the realm of the main apps w deploy. It > would be kinda cool to collaborate on such things. > > Thanks, > Brent > > On Jan 5, 2012, at 11:14 AM, Walter Heck - Tribily wrote: > > Puppet is definitely the bomb here. To get up and running takes a > little effort, but there are a great many modules out there that will > speed up your deployment. We barely ever log into a server manually > anymore, and I'm loving it :) > > Walter > > PS. Our puppet modules are here: https://github.com/tribily > > On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 20:08, epac wrote: > > On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Tom Taylor wrote: > > > What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? > > > > puttet, chef > > > that should do it for you... > > > Jok > > > --- > > Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool... > >  oo > > ,(..)\ > >  ~~ > > > > > -- > Walter Heck > -- > Co-founder @ Tribily (http://tribily.com) > In-depth Server Monitoring as a Service > -- > Follow @tribily on Twitter and/or 'Like' our Facebook page at > http://www.facebook.com/tribily > > -- Walter Heck -- Co-founder @ Tribily (http://tribily.com) In-depth Server Monitoring as a Service -- Follow @tribily on Twitter and/or 'Like' our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/tribily

Have a look at ipxe, booting off a webserver is the coolest part http://ipxe.org/ iPXE is the leading open source network boot firmware. It provides a full PXE implementation enhanced with additional features such as: ? boot from a web server via HTTP ? boot from an iSCSI SAN ? boot from a Fibre Channel SAN via FCoE ? boot from an AoE SAN ? boot from a wireless network ? boot from a wide-area network ? boot from an Infiniband network ? control the boot process with a script + puppet in the image + foreman http://theforeman.org/ Ben On 5 Jan 2012, at 20:08, Walter Heck - Tribily wrote: > I can recommend making the effort. We're slowly doing it and the > quality of our modules improves enormously since we need to clean them > up and make them totally environment agnostic before opensourcing them > :) > > On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 20:47, Brent Hensarling wrote: >> I have been thinking about putting our modules up on github myself ( they >> need a bit more cleaning first). There is a ton of good modules and >> manifests out there, but not much in the realm of the main apps w deploy. It >> would be kinda cool to collaborate on such things. >> >> Thanks, >> Brent >> >> On Jan 5, 2012, at 11:14 AM, Walter Heck - Tribily wrote: >> >> Puppet is definitely the bomb here. To get up and running takes a >> little effort, but there are a great many modules out there that will >> speed up your deployment. We barely ever log into a server manually >> anymore, and I'm loving it :) >> >> Walter >> >> PS. Our puppet modules are here: https://github.com/tribily >> >> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 20:08, epac wrote: >> >> On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Tom Taylor wrote: >> >> >> What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? >> >> >> >> puttet, chef >> >> >> that should do it for you... >> >> >> Jok >> >> >> --- >> >> Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool... >> >> oo >> >> ,(..)\ >> >> ~~ >> >> >> >> >> -- >> Walter Heck >> -- >> Co-founder @ Tribily (http://tribily.com) >> In-depth Server Monitoring as a Service >> -- >> Follow @tribily on Twitter and/or 'Like' our Facebook page at >> http://www.facebook.com/tribily >> >> > > > > -- > Walter Heck > -- > Co-founder @ Tribily (http://tribily.com) > In-depth Server Monitoring as a Service > -- > Follow @tribily on Twitter and/or 'Like' our Facebook page at > http://www.facebook.com/tribily -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sohonet Ltd web : http://www.sohonet.com/ The Surest Path support : support@sohonet.com 24x7 : +44 20 7292 6909 +1 310 449 8610 +61 1800 77 5280 For full details of Sohonet's registered offices/addresses please visit http://www.sohonet.com/contact-us/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PXE/Kickstart/Puppet here. If I had it all to do again I'd dump Puppet and use something else. While it does the job we've also had several stability problems, the biggest of which is memory leaks in both the server and clients. I ended up running the server in a while loop because the Out Of Memory killer would kill it every couple of days when the machine ran out of memory. On the clients I often see the puppet daemon using over 1GB of RAM. All of our software is installed centrally on an NFS server and run though wrappers to set up environment variables, etc. If you've got more than 2 computers and you're not using a configuration management/deployment tool and centrally installed software then you're just making work for yourself. On 05/01/12 18:34, Tom Taylor wrote: > Howdy, > > Thought I'd throw up a general question to everyone as to what they're > using for deployment of linux, both OS and then software. > > We've got kickstart running here which is great for PXE booting the OS and > some simple settings. > > What I'd like to do now is deploy flare to 50 machines. Any suggestions? > > I've looked at spacewalk which seems to be a nice piece of software but I > was wondering what everyone else is doing? > > There's a great paid software that I found but it's a tad on the expensive > side, bonus is that it's multi-platform: http://www.filewave.com/en/home > > -TT > > > > Tom Taylor > Engineer > > The Mill > 451 Broadway, New York, 10013 > +1 212 337 3210 > > www.themill.com > www.twitter.com/MillChannel > www.facebook.com/MillChannel > > Please consider the environment before printing this email. > This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system. > > Please use the following link to view Mill Touch. > http://www.themill.com/work/mill-touch/behind-the-scenes.aspx > > > > __________________________________________________________________ > This message has been checked for all known viruses by MessageLabs -- Shane McEwan Aardman Animations - 1410 Aztec West, Bristol, BS32 4RT Phone: 01454 859000 Ext: 4526 Mobile: 07733 295 808 ________________________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by MessageLabs

On 01/06/12 17:58, Douglas Beal wrote: > We are about to take a look at fsc/cachefilesd on SL 6.1. What conditions would cause a kernel panic? I haven't seen a linux kernel panic in so long, I can't even remember what they look like. I'd say the same for windows, but I saw 3 of them today while trying to boot the Windows 7 64bit install DVD on an old 64bit Northgate machine, which just doesn't seem to like Win7.

Much to my disappointment, we have been seeing a few stack traces in dmesg and weird behaviours recently (Fedora 13). We're still narrowing it down, but this may be the cause. We aren't 100% sure it's fsc yet though as we'd been using it happily for at least 9 months before we saw (noticed maybe?) any issues. I'll reply to the list if we find it is this. -- Stephen Willey | Head of Systems T: +44 794 472 0543 E: stephen.willey@primefocusworld.com A: 2-4 Bucknall Street, London WC2H 8LA ________________________________________ From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com [studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com] on behalf of Greg Ercolano [erco_mlist@seriss.com] Sent: 07 January 2012 02:06 To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Mass linux deployment - OS and Software. On 01/06/12 17:58, Douglas Beal wrote: > We are about to take a look at fsc/cachefilesd on SL 6.1. What conditions would cause a kernel panic? I haven't seen a linux kernel panic in so long, I can't even remember what they look like. I'd say the same for windows, but I saw 3 of them today while trying to boot the Windows 7 64bit install DVD on an old 64bit Northgate machine, which just doesn't seem to like Win7.

i got a dell server in the other day, 4 sockets, 16 core procs in each, it kernel panicked every time i tried to put a pre-2011 OS on it (fedora 14, centos 5.5) and would only take centos 6 / fedora 16... also had our xCat server die in kernel panic late last week (people who have read my posts know that doesn't really bother me much though...) kernel panics are all around you! -DY On 2012-01-06, at 9:06 PM, Greg Ercolano wrote: > On 01/06/12 17:58, Douglas Beal wrote: >> We are about to take a look at fsc/cachefilesd on SL 6.1. What conditions would cause a kernel panic? > > I haven't seen a linux kernel panic in so long, > I can't even remember what they look like. > > I'd say the same for windows, but I saw 3 of them today while > trying to boot the Windows 7 64bit install DVD on an old 64bit > Northgate machine, which just doesn't seem to like Win7. > >

Heh, I must admit I might be "cheating" by only installing new linux distros on oldish hardware. Long ago I learned with linux, always stay at least a year or so behind the curve with hardware. Gives the driver guys enough time to reverse engineer the stuff, and the community enough time to debug it. I'd do this with printers, ethernet controllers, mobo, everything. I just pretended that new hardware didn't exist yet. Sometimes though, I'd accidentally find myself on the bleeding edge, like a year or so ago I went to pick up a 5th mac mini at the Apple store. But Apple had changed from selling the regular 'old' minis I had such great luck with to these new 'half height' suckers, the really fast ones. Not a single linux distro would install on it; each had the same driver error as soon as the kernel came up; couldn't talk to the drive it just booted off of. Apparently all the linux kernels at that time had a driver issue with the new mini's controllers. All the distro forums had unresolved threads on that issue, and there was much suffering with it all. I eventually just put the box aside for a few months, and when new linux distros came out, I'd try them, and of course one day, it Just Worked.. On 01/09/12 06:13, Dave Young wrote: > i got a dell server in the other day, 4 sockets, 16 core procs in each, it kernel panicked every time i tried to put a pre-2011 OS on it (fedora 14, centos 5.5) and would only take centos 6 / fedora 16... > > also had our xCat server die in kernel panic late last week (people who have read my posts know that doesn't really bother me much though...) > > kernel panics are all around you! > > -DY > > On 2012-01-06, at 9:06 PM, Greg Ercolano wrote: > >> On 01/06/12 17:58, Douglas Beal wrote: >>> We are about to take a look at fsc/cachefilesd on SL 6.1. What conditions would cause a kernel panic? >> I haven't seen a linux kernel panic in so long, >> I can't even remember what they look like. >> [..]