Well it has been since last summer or maybe earlier that most of my systems wanted to fail. I am just now getting around to doing something about it. I understand why my children’s systems and my wife’s system fails quite regularly…. They are probably 8 or 9 years old. Pentium M and Pentium III processors, probably hand-me downs, I don’t remember. Anyway they were nicely equipped with 128M of memory and nice 4G hard drives. I think one had maybe 4 1G drives in a stripe set. Well these sorry things kept failing and I would have to replace them with whatever I could find.
Then my hard drive failed in my file server. Don’t understand that, it was about 4 months out of warranty.
Then a disc in my firewall failed.
I patched all this mess together and have been limping along with mainly my laptop as the main system….
I tried install OpenSolaris last weekend on the file server box. I made two discoveries — OpenSolaris will not install from a usb dvd player, I have no internal dvd players at my disposal.
I then discovered that OpenSolaris will not install over the network, well it says it does, I will have to see what I can hack out on that. I really want to run ZFS on my fileserver.
That is why I need to rebuild my automated system administration infrastructure.
I need this mainly so I can build systems more easily when discs fail. Yeah, I know, I could purchase new discs and newer systems, but where is the fun in that (not to mention lack of available funds for such a thing)?
My goals here are:
- Rebuild the automatic system administration infrastructure I once had.
- Document the thing here so I will not have to do it again from scratch (and maybe get inputs from the more geekified public).
- Learn how to operate this wordpress thing in the process.
The software and tools I tend to deploy are:
- Debian GNU/Linux
- FAI
- puppet
- to a lesser extend cfengine, mainly because it is a dependency of FAI.
- git
I will write more later as I progress on this little adventure.
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