managing servers...

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2005-05-29 at 11:25, bruce wrote:
> scott,
> 
> your points are valid, and work well for someone who has the expertise/time
> to really get comfortable, and to know what's going on... but i'm
> envisioning a market/targeted customer base of people who don't have that
> level of expertise, nor do they want to go there...
> 
> as an example, i have 10-15 servers... i'm not an admin, and for the things
> that i'm working on, i don't want to be one... however, i'd still like to
> know that the boxes are corectly setup for the given functions.. right now,
> i don't. as i said, my gut tells me that a combination of the control
> panels/sourcelabs.com with monitoring, and some other functionality would be
> useful...
> 
> not everybody wants to live at the edge.. in fact, a lot of people want
> something that works, that's stable, and that's tested...
> 


Please don't top post.  :)

So you are looking to develop such an application?  Go for it!  

I don't believe anything like that exists today.  Which is why I
recommended collecting the tools that support the particular
applications you use in your environment.  In most cases there are
several alternatives so you can pick the one that works best for you. 
In those cases where there are no good alternatives you will be forced
to build your own.  Most admins have at one time or another thrown
together scripts to make certain things easier.  

Building such a tool will result in things like YAST and the system-
files that Fedora has available.  They can get the job done for a large
percentage of the users but they are unable to handle 100% of the
configurations out there.  A good example of this is the
system-config-iptables tool.  It has limited functionality.  It can
easily do the things that probably 60% of the users of Fedora need.  The
other 40% however need to be able to add rules to allow Samba through or
other protocols or applications which that tool does not allow.  Could
it be expanded, yes, given significant development effort.  Would it
cover 100% of the users then, probably not.  There will always be users
with applications that fall out side of what the tool builder can
envision.  

And I am not suggesting anyone live on the edge.  Particularly in a
production environment.  But an admin must keep up with the latest
security issues and make sure their environment is not susceptible to
any security flaws that have been identified.  This sometimes means
applying patches or new versions of some applications which make keeping
monolithic configuration/management applications working difficult.

In your example it sounds like by default you are the admin.  You may be
new to it but that is the reality.  :)

Kind of like a long time ago when I became the admin of a Vax 11/780
because I kept making recommendations on how it should be run.  I had my
regular job to do as well, the admin gig was just a second job.  :)

I still recommend you make a list of the services and applications you
need to run across those 10 or 15 servers then work out what kind of
monitoring, management, reporting you need for those services.  Find the
tools that allow you to accomplish those items.  You can then put
together a quick web page that allows you to access those functions from
a single page. 

 
-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Here I am in 53 B.C. and all I want is a dill pickle!!