Wild-eyed thinking aloud: Python System Management Infrastructure

[Roman Suzi]

On 3 Aug 2001, William Annis wrote:

Have you looked at Freshmeat close enough? I thought there
were several tools to make multi-machine administration easy.

Or maybe you just want to install Radius and let all AAA to
be done there. There are several Freeware variants available,
xtRadius for example.

I have not tried, but NIS and LDAP are also Open Source.

Plus (if I understood correctly) you need backup solution. This is also
available from Freshmeat. Or you can buy BRU or something.

When selecting tools, look how scriptable they are.

>        I've been a Unix system adminstrator for about 7 years now,
>longer if you count my student admin jobs.  With a few, brief
>exceptions, I have always worked places with small computing budgets.
>We can't afford sexy system management packages which can sometimes
>cost in the US$100,000s.  I mean things like Tivoli, CA Unicenter,
>Bull's OpenMaster, etc.
>
>        About once a year I run into some situation where I *want*
>something like one of these tools.  Like many academic sites, we
>started small with a handful of Unix machines and a few dozon users.
>Now we have 100s of users and about 70 Unix machines all doing
>different jobs.  Now I regularly have to rewrite or at least try to
>fix the tools that worked with 15 machines but now fall down: a mass
>of shell scripts, C and perl glommed together with duct tape, caffeine
>and cheap, grad-student labor.
>
>        It may all just make me crazy.  Our old user management system
>(perl and some C) had a unique and beautiful problem.  It generated
>/etc/passwd and /etc/group from a single data file.  An extra space at
>the end of a line could cause some confusion in the parsing, and what
>you sometimes got was a recreated /etc/passwd with the names and UIDs
>slightly out of alignment.  It was a wonder to behold, a nightmare to
>fix.  That system is gone now.
>
>        As the years go by I keep reimplementing these things (if
>we're lucky, we buy something) and I can't help but wonder if there
>isn't some Better Way.  I keep writing these tools, but they can't
>chat with each other.
>
>        Recently I have found myself designing a database-driven
>system to keep track of our machines, what they do, where they sit,
>etc., and I keep thinking "William, you should write an
>*infrastructure* for all this system junk you do."  I've been working
>on a system monitoring tool for several years now, so I have some
>experience in writing distributed systems that, so I already have some
>ideas.  My thoughts right now lean toward a central communications
>daemon/dispatcher attached to a database with various other daemons
>devoted to specfic tasks:
>
>    * keep track of machine data (my current worry)
>    * user data (including fiscal data if necessary)
>    * system monitoring, event and problem notification
>    * for the adventurous, things like printer and job control, etc...
>      (this should be a infrastructure, and it should be easy
>      to plug in whatever you can think up)
>
>Of course there are free various tools that do these sorts of things
>out there, but they don't exactly play well together, if at all.  I
>have ideas on how communication should work, and though I have avoided
>the XML kool-aid up to now, I'm willing to concede XML-RPC might be
>useful here.
>
>        I'd rather not do this alone. So, if there are other Unix
>admins, or NT admins, for that matter, who want to see their favorite
>language used to develop something like this and are willing to do
>some actual work, please contact me.  If there's no interest, I'll
>just crawl back into my office and hush up. :)
>
>

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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