[wplug] Administration of Lots of Machines

Jonathan Billings billings at negate.org
Sat Apr 8 21:29:46 EDT 2006


On Apr 8, 2006, at 8:19 PM, Michael Semcheski wrote:

> This notebook proved to be extremely valuable.  It sounds like such a
> simple thing, but it really paid off.  The person in charge wasn't
> really that knowledgeable of computers, but recognized the value of
> documenting his work.  That was his principle of administration.

I like a Wiki, or some other tool that keeps revision control.  That  
way, you can see the history of a procedure, and who's recently made  
changes/additions.

>  I think my philosophy is to standardize as much as possible, do
> things that can be done to every machine or don't do them.  That's not
> always possible, but it helps to simplify things.

I recently had to start managing a large number of unix and linux  
systems, and I used a really cool tool called cfengine (http:// 
www.cfengine.org/).  It's an amazing tool for a sysadmin, and it  
helped me start managing a largely unmanaged network.  I'm also  
working on using GNU Stow to push out software packages.

--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>




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