When building new Virtual Machines (VM’s) in a corporate environment, it’s preferred to built them with a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and while you can do this manually by attaching an ISO image and selecting options, it’s far more productive to do this using a kickstart script so you can achieve repeatability and adhere to …
Managing LVM Storage
For most server environments you are going to have a disk for the OS and possibly a disk for additional data. And in most cases, you would define the layout of the disks in a kickstart file using Logical Volume Manager (LVM). LVM is a robust mechanism to achieve this and is fully supported in …
Managing Files
Controlling files on a Salt Minion is a common operation that SaltStack does well. The basic principle is that if the file is changed on the Minion, then a state run should return it back to a known State as dictated by the Salt Master. Files can be static objects that the Master just downloads …
Managing CRON via SaltStack
One of the key messages this guide aims to emphasize is “simplicity”. Hand in hand with “simplicity” is “Visibility”, if you can see something related to a State then you can get a better idea of the implications the State will have. One of the powerful features of the UNIX environment has been the CRON …
Using the Salt Stack Scheduler
Overview SaltStack provides a built in scheduling system that allows you to run any functions you could run in a state file. Of particular interest in this article is using the scheduler to periodically run highstates on a Salt Minion and a couple of the management tools to list and remove those scheduled jobs. Prerequisites …
Using PVMOVE
LVM is one of the main stay storage technologies in almost all Linux installations and while adding a Logical Volume (LV) is common, migrating an LV is a task that many System Administrators baulk at. Over time, most Linux Systems that have growing storage needs tend to suffer from add-hoc storage allocation which results in …
Configuring a low memory VPS for NGINX, PHP-FPM and MariaDB.
I recently moved this web site and a dozen others to a new VPS, in the process I went from an Apache HTTPD server to NGINX with PHP being handled by PHP-FPM. The base OS is just a minimal build CENTOS 7 which is very much end of life, normally I deploy Oracle Linux 8.8 …
HPC Rebuild – 12 Months on
It’s great to be able to review work you have done in the past and then be able to re-factor it for the current climate and in 2023 we will be contracted to re-engineer and upgrade the HPC platform we designed and built for one of Australia’s most prestigious Medical Research Institutes back in 2020-2021. …
Programmatically add LACP
Implementing a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) that uses LACP to aggregate all the defined ethernet links is a well used and documented process. However under Redhat/CENTOS 7 and 8 the addition of NetworkManager can both throw a spanner in the mix and allow an easy way to dynamically add LACP during a kickstart install. During …
Build a Lustre High Performance Cluster
Coming Soon using v2.12.5 Overview Building a (Non HA) Cluster Todo – TCP LNET Overview Metadata Server Todo – Installing the Components – e2fsprogs, kmod, lustre Todo – Recommended Storage Needs (RAID-10 stripes) Todo – /etc/fstab entry for mount on boot. Object Storage Servers Todo – Installing the Components – e2fsprogs, kmod, lustre Todo – …