SoCoSA.org Sonoma County System Administrators

Red Hat Directory Server / CentOS Directory Server provides an easily administered and robust solution for entities needing an enterprise class LDAP system. With support for 4 way multi-master replication, easy integration into the Red Hat suite of systems, and comprehensive documentation, it’s a good choice for both deploying a new LDAP structure and migrating from an existing one.

Covered topics will include:
Implementing redundancy through multi-master replication
Configuring clients to connect to LDAP for single sign on
Using pGina to provide LDAP auth for windows
Using Samba to provide single sign on for windows through native windows client

After attending this talk a system administrator of moderate experience with windows and Linux should be able to implement single sign on for a small heterogeneous network with little effort.

This month at SoCoSA we'll be covering BackupPC, a popular and very full featured open source backup system. BackupPC supports backup through SMB, Tar/gz over SSH or NFS, or rsync. The killer feature of BackupPC is file pooling, which allows identical files from different backups, or even different systems, to take up only the space of a single file on the backup server. This allows moderately priced backup servers to vastly increase the number of system they can backup, the retention period of backups, or both.

RT: Request Tracker is a powerful trouble ticket and support system written entirely in perl.

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization. It uses carefully engineered data structures and algorithms to achieve very low per-node overheads and high concurrency. The implementation is robust, has been ported to an extensive set of operating systems and processor architectures, and is currently in use on thousands of clusters around the world. It has been used to link clusters across university campuses and around the world and can scale to handle clusters with 2000 nodes.

Eric will discuss the puppet configuration management system for automating many common system administration tasks on unix systems. He’ll be concentrating on the puppet language, but also include some of the other details about how it all works and why you might want to use it.

Slides: OpenOffice.org format: puppet-talk.odp
Slides: PDF: puppet-talk.pdf

Don will talk about cricket.

Cricket is a high performance, extremely flexible system for monitoring trends in time-series data. In other words: it makes lots of pretty graphs that make it easier to understand what’s been going on with your servers and/or network. It’s really good at getting data via SNMP, but if you can get some number out of something automatically you can get cricket to graph it.

Here’s an example graph; Sonoma State’s primary internet connection traffic over the past year:

Can you tell which week’s classes were in session?

The PowerDNS Nameserver is a modern, advanced and high performance authoritative-only nameserver. It is written from scratch and conforms to all relevant DNS standards documents. Furthermore, PowerDNS interfaces with almost any database.

In this talk August will discuss how PowerDNS can serve your Name Serving needs, some of its advantages and disadvantages, how it can play well with other Name Servers and how you can migrate to it.

August is the Senior System Administrator at Sonic.net; more information about him can be found at his personal website: www.schwer.us .

Note: The time has been adjusted slightly for this meeting to accomodate the Sebastopol fireworks.

Rob will give a 1 hour overview of Rails including server setup, admin issues and templating.

What is Ruby on Rails? "Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern." What that means, basically, is that it lets programmers write applications without needing to worry too much about the boring details. Alternately, it's a a new, very popular way to create dynamic websites quickly and easily. Even if you're not a programmer you'll eventually want to deploy some cool new Rails application, and maybe even customize it a little for your site's needs.

Join Luke and Neal to hear about Xen, the exciting new technology that will make your life happier and more productive. (Don't believe anything they say to the contrary -- they're just old and cynical.)

Xen is a virtualization technology that offers nearly all the traditional advantages of virtualization with near-native speeds. Using Xen, administrators can partition users into separate virtual machines, developers can rapidly test network applications, home users can enjoy robust checkpoints and configuration management. Right now it's all hackerware, but the revolution is coming.