18 Oct 2000 Michael   » (Journeyer)

SysAdmin

Dipped my fingers into the messy world of ad hoc distributed sys admin today. I got using my NetBSD enabled shark so much (see previous episodes for details :-) that I wanted to mount my home space there. Being a largish dept we have a central place for such things. However, to access this a machine needs to be "trusted" by the dept. The first stage of reaching this was teaching master about both NetBSD and sharks.

Master is what we use as a centralised point of configuration for (almost) all our unix boxen (it originated from cl.cam.ac.uk, but came up Glasgow via a couple of people we hired from there). Master is responsible for distributing standard files (such as those in /etc), tools (our version of arch), setting up the automount maps etc., and it does this for a hetrogenous collection of machine types and Unix types. Anyway, breaking this would not make me popular.

Thus I spent a while understanding how a NetBSD machine is setup (who stole tcpd? :-) on both ix86 and the sharks. I then compiled up the correct version of essential binaries for both platforms (e.g. rdist), secured the boxes with hosts.[allow|deny] and inetd, plus all the other magic the department requires, and distilled it all into master, along with the documentation of what I'd done.

And it looks like it works. The proof will be when I come in tomorrow morning and the nightly dist has happened with no errors. Now adding a new NetBSD box to the dept should be real easy.

Now I can go back to real work...

Update

All seemed to go well with master - phew!

Went juggling with Greg -- first time in an age I've been. Good fun.

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