Fwd: [Beowulf] Configuration change monitoring

[Walid]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Walid <walid.shaari at gmail.com>
Date: Aug 30, 2007 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Configuration change monitoring
To: "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu>

Hi Robert

On 8/30/07, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:

> To amplify Mark's remark a bit -- linux in general already has many
> fairly powerful tools for DOING monitoring, updates, and so on.  For
> example, one can use e.g. yum, kickstart, apt, and more to install a
> "canned" node configuration and keep it up to date.  It is so totally
> automatic that there is basically no need to "check for inconsistencies"
> on a node. Warewulf and several other tools also permit one to have
> rigorous control over node configuration.


Some of the inconsistencies we see is usually when one of the admin choses
the easy routes, and does changes manually to a set of nodes, and does not
update the installation files (our installations are rpm kickstart based),
others are becuase we manage quite a large variants and by mistake or
intention configurations files that are not supposed to be on cluster A
appears on Cluster B.

Monitoring tools abound, of course, ranging from things like syslog-ng
> for centralized monitoring/logging of LAN systems activity to nightly
> ... ...
> Is there something else one needs to do?  Well, most cluster admins tend
> to be fairly skilled linux administrators and good at shell script magic
> or even real programming.  So if one has an edge-case need that isn't
> directly met by one of the available tools, it is usually a fairly
> simple matter to hack out a script to accomplish it.


That is one reason why they want  to push some commercial tools, They want
to minimize the amount of customizations that are done locally by the team,
as some writes in bash, another writes in Perl, and the other prefers
Python, in the long run there is an issue of maintaining the scripts, and
knowing which set of scripts belongs to which cluster, and what kind of
modifications are needed for new clusters,.etc all of which is documented,
but that is another story

regards

Walid
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