League of Professional System Administrators - Configuration Mgmt

DataCenter Diagram

j940927 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:46:40 -0700

Short Description:
Quickly create images of back of servers showing correct locations of cables. To guide engineers to correct cables etc.

Home Page:
dcd.sysbuild.co.uk

Release Date:
Mon, 2008-09-08 20:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

Quickly create diagrams of all your racks, showing location of all servers within rack, and cabling if required.
Create connection diagrams showing the back of servers with the correct connections going to the correct ports.
Use to guide engineers, to build racks and cable them properly, or when sedning engineers to remote datacenters so the correct cable gets tested etc.

viewvc

doug — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:55:12 -0700

Short Description:
ViewVC is a browser interface for CVS and Subversion version control repositories

Home Page:
viewvc.tigris.org

Release Date:
Thu, 2005-11-24 15:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

ViewVC is a browser interface for CVS and Subversion version control repositories. It generates templatized HTML to present navigable directory, revision, and change log listings. It can display specific versions of files as well as diffs between those versions. Basically, ViewVC provides the bulk of the report-like functionality you expect out of your version control tool, but much more prettily than the average textual command-line program output.
Here are some of the additional features of ViewVC:

Support for filesystem-accessible CVS and Subversion repositories

Individually configurable virtual host support

Line-based annotation/blame display

Revision graph capabilities (CVS only)

Syntax highlighting support

Commit metadata query facilities

Template-driven output generation

Colorized, side-by-side differences

Tarball generation (by tag for CVS, by revision for Subversion)

Localization support based on the Accept-Language request header

Ability to run either as CGI script or as a standalone server

Regexp-based file searching

INI-like configuration file (as opposed to requiring actual code tweaks)

dcache

doug — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:08:46 -0700

Short Description:
a system for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data, distributed among a large number of heterogenous server nodes

Home Page:
www.dcache.org

Release Date:
Wed, 2003-10-29 20:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

The goal of this project is to provide a system for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data, distributed among a large number of heterogenous server nodes, under a single virtual filesystem tree with a variety of standard access methods. Depending on the Persistency Model, dCache provides methods for exchanging data with backend (tertiary) Storage Systems as well as space management, pool attraction, dataset replication, hot spot determination and recovery from disk or node failures. Connected to a tertiary storage system, the cache simulates unlimited direct access storage space. Dataexchanges to and from the underlying HSM are performed automatically and invisibly to the user. Filesystem namespace operations may be performed through a standard nfs(2) interface.

shmux

doug — Thu, 31 May 2007 21:01:41 -0700

Short Description:
shmux is program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel

Home Page:
web.taranis.org/shmux/

Release Date:
Sun, 2002-07-07 21:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

shmux solves a fairly simple problem that can be addressed
with a few lines of shell or Perl. This may lead you to think that using
shmux is total overkill, but shmux is a powerful tool
that offers many time and life saving features, so read on!

When used in a script:
- Ability to define what is and what is not an error for the command
  being run (based on exit code and output content)
- Output and exit codes are saved into files to facilitate use from a
  script.
When used interactively (directly on the command line, or from
within a script/wrapper):
- Well formatted output
- Standard error output displayed in bold
- Real-time status shown
- Ability to pause, resume, quit cleanly
- Automatically pause on error, allowing the user to cleanly stop
  before more goes wrong

tentakel

doug — Tue, 29 May 2007 06:17:09 -0700

Short Description:
Tentakel is a program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel using ssh

Home Page:
tentakel.biskalar.de/

Release Date:
Mon, 2004-01-19 06:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

Tentakel has the following features:

Parallel execution of commands on several hosts.

Format strings that control how the output of the remote commands is about to be displayed and how the output of different hosts should be separated from each other.

A powerful configuration file that can be used to define groups of hosts. Such groups can contain other groups. Each group can be assigned a remote method, a username and a format string.

Easy extensibility to allow for different remote methods (currently only ssh and rsh are supported).

It does not try to be a complex Distributed Resource Management System (DRM) like the Sun Grid Engine or Condor. Tentakel aims to be useful mainly for administration purposes.

git

doug — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:47:19 -0700

Short Description:
popular version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency

Home Page:
git.or.cz/

Release Date:
Thu, 2005-08-11 18:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

Git is distributed version control system focused on speed, effectivity and real-world usability on large projects. Its highlights include:

Strong support for non-linear development. Git supports rapid and convenient branching and merging, and includes powerful tools for visualizing and navigating a non-linear development history.

Distributed development. Like most other modern version control systems, Git gives each developer a local copy of the entire development history, and changes are copied from one such repository to another. These changes are imported as additional development branches, and can be merged in the same way as a locally developed branch. Repositories can be easily accessed via the efficient Git protocol (optionally wrapped in ssh) or simply using HTTP - you can publish your repository anywhere without any special webserver configuration required.

Efficient handling of large projects. Git is very fast and scales well even when working with large projects and long histories. It is commonly an order of magnitude faster than most other revision control systems, and several orders of magnitude faster on some operations. It also uses an extremely efficient packed format for long-term revision storage that currently tops any other open source version control system.

Cryptographic authentication of history. The Git history is stored in such a way that the name of a particular revision (a "commit" in Git terms) depends upon the complete development history leading up to that commit. Once it is published, it is not possible to change the old versions without it being noticed. Also, tags can be cryptographically signed.

Toolkit design. Following the Unix tradition, Git is a collection of many small tools written in C, and a number of scripts that provide convenient wrappers. It is easy to chain the components together to do other clever things.

Besides providing a version control system, the Git project provides a generic low-level toolkit for tree history storage and directory content management. Traditionally, the toolkit is called the plumbing. Several other projects (so-called porcelains) offer compatible version control interfaces - see the related tools list.

Carnegie Mellon NetReg

vitroth — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:18:34 -0800

Short Description:
Enterprise class IP Address, DNS & DHCP management system.

Home Page:
www.net.cmu.edu/netreg

Release Date:
Wed, 2002-01-30 22:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

The Carnegie Mellon NetReg package is a scalable and flexible Web-based system for managing networks. It consolidates information about DNS zones, subnets, machine registrations, and DHCP configuration, and provides tools for easy management. The system exports ISC BIND configuration and zones, and can update them via either static zone files or TSIG signed dynamic DNS updates. It also exports ISC DHCP configurations, and has a SOAP API for integration with other systems.

WPKG

Meier — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 04:11:47 -0800

Short Description:
WPKG is an automated software deployment, upgrade and removal program for Windows.

Home Page:
www.wpkg.org/

Release Date:
Sun, 2005-05-01 05:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

WPKG can add great value to your Samba or Active Directory setup, as it allows to perform software installation, updates, removal etc. on your workstations. It features dependencies and there is a windows service wich does all this on machine start, user logons can be delayed until wpkg has finished its work.

It is also possible to execute custom scripts on your workstations, like synchronizing time, setting printers, changing permissions or adding registry entries (basically, some of the things you would do with Active Directory and Group Policy / GPO).

Basically it is a set of XML files and a javascript program. There is a web-gui for package/machine management available at http://wpkg.linuxkidd.com/.

Bcfg2

nld — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:02:18 -0800

Short Description:
Bcfg2 is a centralized configuration tool that provides reconciliation of the current actual configuration with a specification.

Home Page:
trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2

Release Date:
Wed, 2004-10-06 15:48

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

Bcfg2 is a generative configuration management system that can be used for management of aspects of client systems, complete control of client systems, and the range in between. Bcfg2 is designed to work well in pre-existing environments, and in the presence of manual administration.
Bcfg2's most interesting feature is a web frontend that presents client configuration conformance information to administrators. This provides administrators with a direct way to observe how good of a job they are doing describing how their network should look. To our knowledge, this approach is unique to bcfg2, both as a goal and as a supported operation.

NetDirector Open Source Management Console

gtewallace — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:08:29 -0800

Short Description:
NetDirector is a Web-based Linux and Solaris system administration console with embedded DB for secure, one-to-many management

Home Page:
www.netdirector.org

Release Date:
Tue, 2006-08-01 03:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

NetDirector replaces ad hoc scripts for making configuration changes to many servers at the same time with a well-defined, consistent process.
Schedule Changes to happen anytime in the future
Rollback any change
NetDirector's built-in revision control makes life a lot easier
See who did what, when and what they did - NetDirector stores all change info in its database. Easily export audit trails
Use NetDirector's role-based permissions to enforce segregation of duties. When an Admin logs into NetDirector, they will only see, and can only configure, the servers and services on these servers that pertain to their role.
Group your servers in NetDirector however you want and then apply changes to all servers, to a group of servers, or to any combination of servers you want to. It's up to you.

Facter

lak — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:12:39 -0800

Short Description:
A simple cross-platform tool for collecting facts about your system.

Home Page:
reductivelabs.com/projects/facter

Release Date:
Sat, 2004-10-09 16:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

A cross-platform Ruby library for retrieving facts from operating systems. Supports multiple resolution mechanisms, any of which can be restricted to working only on certain operating systems or environments. Facter is especially useful for retrieving things like operating system names, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and SSH keys.

It is easy to extend Facter to include your own custom facts or to include additional mechanisms for retrieving facts.

Puppet

lak — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:10:55 -0800

Short Description:
A server automation and abstraction framework.

Home Page:
reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet

Release Date:
Sat, 2005-10-01 16:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.

Puppet's simple declarative specification language provides powerful classing abilities for drawing out the similarities between hosts while allowing them to be as specific as necessary, and it handles dependency and prerequisite relationships between objects clearly and explicitly. Puppet is written entirely in Ruby.

Radmind

umeditor — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 08:46:27 -0800

Short Description:
Remote Administration Daemon

Home Page:
radmind.org

Release Date:
Tue, 2002-03-26 21:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

A suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines. For Mac OS X, there's also a graphical interface.

At its core, radmind operates as a tripwire. It is able to detect changes to any managed filesystem object, e.g. files, directories, links, etc. However, radmind goes further than just integrity checking: once a change is detected, radmind can optionally reverse the change.

Each managed machine may have its own loadset composed of multiple, layered overloads. This allows, for example, the operating system to be described separately from applications.