[colug-432] Setting Up New Servers

[Rick Troth]

On 04/16/2015 10:48 AM, Steve VanSlyck wrote:
> Is there anyone here who has ever set up more than two servers? I am
> curious about what you may have thought of or done in terms of
> automating the process.

I have to ask: virtual or physical?

Great responses enumerating some of the "sanity tools" available to us
these days.

If things are virtual, take advantage of it. There are things you can do
in that space that you cannot do with discrete boxes.


> For example getting the sudoers file the way you want it... Adding your
> public key... Configuring your bashrc file... You know, all the little
> things you do to make the server yours. Not necessarily software
> installation although that could be done also.

When the servers are virtual, I like to install once, tweak it, then
clone. (Maybe install twice to be fully aware of what actually got
installed.) The master copy will have Ansible or Puppet or whichever you
like. Naturally the master will have your SSH keys and /etc/sudoers and
the rest.

But you can do better.
In virtualization, cloning is all the rage, but by itself only gives you
... well ... just clones. You can do better by sharing filesystems.

I've made (bad) mistakes in the past by not conveying the full story.
I've been part of cumbersome implementations.
But shared filesystems is a Good Idea.
I have several systems, on different HW architectures, with shared op
sys. The OS is R/O and each "client" has its own root with its own /etc
and /var. But the rest is maintained in one place. Works. Skipping the
details unless someone cares.

And then there's the containers game. (Docker being the hottest player
lately.) Depending on what you're doing, that may be better still.


> I am looking for something that will make the job a little easier to do
> than simply writing down on a piece of paper every single thing I do to
> configure the box and then following my notes for the next server I set
> up.

Low tech works. Don't shred the idea of using paper for some things.

This is where scripting comes in. Better than paper for the sake of
reproducibility. (As noted, doesn't scale too well, but may be a good
starting point.)


> Maybe there is a method of running some sort of diff between the two
> servers that would focus only on the kinds of things a server admin
> would do the first day (assuming he could remember it all, and not
> necessarily every single difference between every single file, which
> would of course be overwhelming.

Harder to do with physically discrete machines. So ... back to that
question: phys or virt? Either way, maybe run checksums against the
files you're interested in and then 'diff' the output.

-- R; <><



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