Rossberry.com
Home of the Mobile Linux Lab
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Overview and bio
Purpose:
It is my hope that this will be useful to others as well. In any case this is a place for me...
- to document my work, to build an online
record of my technical prowess (such as it may be). Yeah, it's a bit
self serving...
- to provide a cookbook style set of howto's for a number of common
pieces of infrastructure software. I'm tired of having to search all
over the web for bits and pieces. I want everything I need in one
place.
Who:
My name is Jim Wildman and I have been hanging around Unix and Linux
since 1985. I've made a living doing SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux
and general technical consulting in manufacturing, retail, healthcare,
finance and online environments. I've worked for some of the largest
companies in several of those fields as well as mom and pop shops.
Hopefully, I've learned a thing or two along the way. I've passed the
RHCE exam twice as well as 2 of the RHCA courses. I was an active
participant in the Central Ohio Linux Users Group (http://www.colug.net)
for many years. You can find some of my presentations at that website.
The Goal:
Specifically I am going to document my 'mobile lab' which allows me to
leverage my bus ride to my real job. Most of the recipes will be aimed
at a 30 minute (or less) completion time. As you can extrapolate, I
have a 40 minute bus ride :-). I am going to include both the howto's
and the whys for the various choices I make. The choices I make may not
be the ones you make (if you chose to follow along) but I will try to
provide enough 'why' that you can season to taste.
The Basics:
I will demonstrate how to use Centos 5 and the included Xen to build a
mobile lab and then to incrementally install key pieces of
infrastructure for running and managing various enterprise solutions.
All of my setup files and scripts will be placed under the GPL (if
needed) and uploaded to this blog and perhaps other sites.
The Hardware:
I'm doing this work on a Toshiba Satellite C645 laptop with 3G of RAM,
an AMD P320 Athlon II cpu and a 250G harddrive. It's plain jane,
straight from Microcenter. At this point, I believe all of the software
that I need will be either in the CentOS repos or rpmforge. I will keep
the OS updated as appropriate.
The OS setup:
As stated above, it is straight CentOS 5. I don't see any sense in
doing it on another platform since RHEL dominates the corporate market
(plus it is what I know). If there are limitations, I am going to have
to work around them for customers anyway, so might as well do it here.
The software:
In scope at the moment
- Xen
- virtual machine building and cloning
- Cobbler (oops, that's in EPEL...)
- logical volume resizing
- Apache
- DNS customized to our setup
- DHCP customized to our setup
- ntp
- ssh keying
- local sendmail setup
- cfengine
- basic source code control using both Subversion and git
- web based access to Subversion repos
- rpm building
- monitoring of machines
- SELinux
- tcpwrappers
- iSCSI
- performance monitoring
that should keep me busy for a while.