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• Kickstart: Serve dynamic kickstart images via a CGI or PHP script?

  - by Stefan Lasiewski

  I'd like to kickstart a couple dozen RHEL6/SL6 servers. However, some of these servers are different and I don't want to create a new ks.cfg file for each class of server. Are there any products which can generate a Kickstart file dynamically on the fly, from a template? For example, if I append a line like this to the KERNEL: APPEND ks=http://192.168.1.100/cgi-bin/ks.cgi Then the script ks.cgi can determine what host this is (Via the MAC address), and print out Kickstart options which are appropriate for that host. I could optionally override some options by passing parameters to the script, like this: APPEND ks=http://192.168.1.100/cgi-bin/ks.cgi?NODETYPE=production&IP=192.168.2.80 After we kickstart the server, we activate Cfengine/Puppet on this system and manage the system using our favorite Configuration Management product. We're experimenting with xCAT but it is proving too cumbersome. I've looked into Cobbler, but I'm not sure it does this. Update: A roll-your-own solution is discussed in the O'Reilly book: Managing RPM-Based Systems with Kickstart and Yum, Chapter 3. Customizing Your Kickstart Install Dynamic ks.cfg, which echos some of the comments in this thread: To implement such a tool is beyond the scope of this Short Cut, but I can walk through the high-level design. Any such solution would mix a data store (the things that change) with a templating solution (the things that don’t change). The data store would hold the per-machine data, such as the IP address and hostname. You would also need a unique identifier, perhaps the hostname, such that you could pick up a given machine’s data. The data store could be a flat file, XML data, or a relational database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. In turn, to invoke the system, you pass a machine’s unique identifier as a URL parameter. For example: boot: linux ks=http://your.kickstart.server/gen_config?host-server25 In this example, the CGI (or servlet, or whatever) generates a ks.cfg for the machine server25. But where, oh where, is the code for ks.cgi?

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• Why would I need a firewall if my server is well configured?

  - by Aitch

  I admin a handful of cloud-based (VPS) servers for the company I work for. The servers are minimal ubuntu installs that run bits of LAMP stacks / inbound data collection (rsync). The data is large but not personal, financial or anything like that (ie not that interesting) Clearly on here people are forever asking about configuring firewalls and such like. I use a bunch of approaches to secure the servers, for example (but not restricted to) ssh on non standard ports; no password typing, only known ssh keys from known ips for login etc https, and restricted shells (rssh) generally only from known keys/ips servers are minimal, up to date and patched regularly use things like rkhunter, cfengine, lynis denyhosts etc for monitoring I have extensive experience of unix sys admin. I'm confident I know what I'm doing in my setups. I configure /etc files. I have never felt a compelling need to install stuff like firewalls: iptables etc. Put aside for a moment the issues of physical security of the VPS. Q? I can't decide whether I am being naive or the incremental protection a fw might offer is worth the effort of learning / installing and the additional complexity (packages, config files, possible support etc) on the servers. To date (touch wood) I've never had any problems with security but I am not complacent about it either.

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• Generating/managing config files for hosted application

  - by mfinni

  I asked a question about config management, and haven't seen a reply. It's possible my question was too vague, so let's get down to brass tacks. Here's the process we follow when onboarding a new customer instance into our hosted application : how would you manage this? I'm leaning towards a Perl script to populate templates to generate shell scripts, config files, XML config files, etc. Looking briefly at CFengine and Chef, it seems like they're not going to reduce the amount of work, because I'd still have to manually specify all of the changes/edits within the tool. Doesn't seem to be much of a gain over touching the config files directly. We add a stanza to the main config file for the core (3rd-party) application. This stanza has values that defines the instance (customer) name the TCP listener port for this instance (not one currently used) the DB2 database name (serial numeric identifier, already exists, they get prestaged for us by the DBAs) three sub-config files, by name - they need to be created from 3 templates and be named after the instance The sub-config files define: The filepath for the DB2 volumes The filepath for the storage of objects The filepath for just one of the DB2 volumes (yes, redundant to the first item. We run some application commands, start the instance We do some LDAP thingies (make an OU for the instance, etc.) We add a stanza to the config file for our security listener that acts as a passthrough to LDAP instance name LDAP OU TCP port for instance DB2 database name We restart the security listener (off-hours), change the main config file from item 1, stop and restart the instance. It is now authenticating via LDAP. We add the stop and start commands for this instance to the HA failover scripts. We import an XML config file into the instance that defines things for the actual application for the customer - user names, groups, permissions, and business rules. The XML is supplied by the implementation team. Now, we configure the dataloading application We add a stanza to the existing top-level config file that points to a new customer-level config file. The new customer-level config file includes: the instance (customer) name the DB2 database name arbitrary number of sub-config files, by name Each of the sub-config files defines: filepaths to the directories for ingestion, feedback, backup, and failure those filepaths have a common path to a customer-specific folder, and then one folder for each sub-config file Each of those filepaths needs to be created We need to add this customer instance to our monitoring scripts that confirm the proper processes are running and can be logged into. Of course, those monitoring config files include the instance name, the TCP port, the DB2 database name, etc. There's also a reporting application that needs to be configured for the new instance. You get the idea. There's also XML that is loaded into WAS by the middleware team. We give them the values for them to plug into the XML - they could very easily hand us the template and we could give them back completed XML.

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• Deployment/provisioning tool for commercial applications (not developed in-house)

  - by mfinni

  I help manage a few hosted commercial applications, and we have a lot of manual processes involved when doing new customer-instance deployments into the shared (multitenant) environment. Allow me to describe the most relevant features, and then we can talk about the tools. We have an application on AIX, that requires dozens of changes to config files (some plain text, some XML) as well as a good number of commands to be run on multiple servers - some to start the new instance, some to restart our shared authentication and reporting engines, etc. The config changes follow templates, of course. The servers in question will also depend on the initial conditions specified by the implementer/deployer - we may choose to deploy a given customer to our servers in Europe, or one set of servers may be active-active whereas a different set of servers is active-passive - in short, there's a lot of complications. We have another application that run on IIS 6 and SQL. The DBAs don't want any automation of the SQL components and that's fine with me, but automating the IIS bit would be great. For a new customer instance, we make a filesystem copy of a template Virtual Directory target named after the new customer, make a new AppPool to match, edit a VirDir template .xml file to replace the filepaths and AppPool names with the new ones, and then make a new VirDir from the modified template XML to point to the new filesystem folder and app pool. For the first case, something like ControlTier or Chef might be good. For the second, the new(ish) Web Deploy from MS would probably do a good job. Has anyone used these tools or others to do something similar for applications? More of a nice-to-have, not a fixed requirement - Has anyone used anything that works on both platforms? I'm looking for something free, because the official word is that within a year, we will have whatever HP has renamed the OpsWare suite, which should be able to do stuff like this. Edit - based on someone's suggestion, looking at CFengine for the AIX application, it doesn't seem to address my pain. The problem isn't keeping a given config synced across dozens of servers, we have rsync for that. The problem is that onboarding a new customer instance touches dozens of files, putting pieces of the same or similar information into them - some are new stanzas in existing files, some are new files, and some are new directories. This is a several-hours-long process that is also error-prone because it's mostly done by hand. I guess I'm looking for config-file generation and management. I have built a small Perl script to do something similar for a much smaller case - it binds a CSV file into variables, and then does a copy-and-search-and-replace from a set of template config files. I could probably do the same here.

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