[olug] System management tools

[Sean Kelly]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 11:01:16PM -0600, Daniel Pfile wrote:
> That said, I dug for some more links.
> http://www.open-challenge.nl/scc/index.html

This looks interesting.

> System configuration collector. Looks neat. Should help with your 
> baseline.
> http://www.stokely.com/unix.sysadm.resources/autosysmgm.backup.html

I ran across this one earlier. Some good links, and some mediocre ones.
It is more monitoring than managing, though both are pretty important. I
think our environment will end up using some combination of Cricket,
Nagios, Ipswitch, Inc.'s WhatsUp Gold (ick :<), and Nagios. Cfengine also
seems to becoming more and more like the tool of choice, along with many
custom script thingies.

> I'm going to hope you're using some sort of directory to manage users 
> and naming.

One would hope that, wouldn't they? :( Currently, we are not using any
directory on the *nix machines. The Windows world uses Active Directory. A
tie-in to that would be nice, but somewhat evil as well. Finding a prpoer
user directory solution is another issue I plan to conquer.

Basically, I am coming up with a proposal to change the way we admin our
machiens entirely to bring administrative tasks up to date and no longer
deal with managing 24+ machines on an individual basis with accounts and
passwords being independent across all machines. It is pretty messy and
painful.

> If not, look into it. Gash2 is something I looked into 
> while working on another project. It's kind of a meta directory 
> configuration engine.
> http://tools.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2/

This is also very cool.

-- 
Sean Kelly         | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly at zombie.org | http://www.zombie.org