Linux.conf.au 2015 – Day 2 – Session 2 – Sysadmin Miniconf

Mass automatic roll out of Linux with Windows as a VM guest – Steven Sykes

  • Was late and missed the start of the talk

etcd: distributed locking and service discovery – Brandon Philips

  • /etc distributed
  • open source, failure tolerant, durable, watchable, exposed via http, runtime configurable
  • API – get/put/del  basics plus some extras
  • Applications
    • Locksmith, distributed locks used when machines update
    • Vulcan http load balancer
  • Leader Election
    • TTL and atomic operations
    • Magical stuff explained faster than I can type it.
    • Just one leader cluster-wide
  • Aims for consistence ahead of raw performance

 

Linux at the University – Randy Appleton

  • No numbers on how many students use Linux
  • Peninsula Michigan
  • 3 schools
  • Michigan Tech
    • research, 7k students, 200CS Students, Sysadmin Majors in biz school
    • Linux used is Sysadmin courses, one of two main subjects
    • Research use Linux “alot”
    • Inactive LUG
    • Scripting languages. Python, perl etc
  • Northern Michigan
    • 9k students, 140 CS Majors
    • Growing CIS program
    • No Phd Programs
    • Required for sophomore and senior network programming course
    • Optional Linux sysadmin course
    • Inactive LUG
    • Sysadmin course: One teacher, app of the week (Apache, nfs, email ), shell scripting at end, big project at the end
    • No problem picking distributions, No problem picking topics, huge problem with desperate incoming knowledge
    • Kernel hacking. Difficult to do, difficult to teach, best students do great. Hard to teach the others
  • Lake Superior State
    • 2600 students
    • 70 CS Majors
    • One professor teaches Sysadmin and PHP/MySQL
    • No LUG
    • Not a lot of research
  • What is missing
    • Big power Universities
    • High Schools – None really
    • Community college – None really
  • Usage for projects
    • Sometimes, not for video games
  • Usage for infrastructure
    • Web sites, ALL
    • Beowuld Clusters
    • Databases – Mostly
  • Obstacles
    • Not in High Schools
    • Not on laptops, not supported by Uni
    • Need to attract liberal studies students
    • Is Sysadmin a core concept – not academic enough
  • What would make it better
    • Servers but not desktops
    • Not a edu distribution
    • Easier than Eclispe , better than visual studio

Untangling the strings: Scaling Puppet with inotify – Steven McDonald

  • Around 1000 nodes at site
  • Lots of small changes, specific to one node that we want to happen quickly
  • Historically restarting the puppet master after each update
  • Problem is the master gets slow as you scale up
  • 1300 manifests, takes at least a minute to read each startup
  • Puppet internal caching very coarse, per environment basis (and they have only one prod one)
  • Multiple environments doesn’t work well at site
  • Ideas – tell puppet exactly what files have changed with each rollout (via git, inotify). But puppet doesn’t support this
  • I missed the explan of exactly how puppet parses the change. I think it is “import” which is getting removed in the future
  • Inotify seemed to be more portable and simpler
  • Speed up of up to 5 minutes for nodes with complex catalogs, 70 seconds off average agent run
  • implementation doesn’t support the future parser, re-opening the class in a seperate file is not supported
  • Available on github. Doesn’t work with current ruby-inotify ( in current master branch )

 

 

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