Sysadmin Todo List

This is an unordered set of tasks. Detailed information on any of the tasks typically goes in related topics' pages, although usually not until the task has been filed under Completed.

Daily Check off list

Each day when you come in check the following:

Einstein (script):
1. Up and running?
2. Disks are at less than 90% full?
3. Mail system OK? (spamassasin, amavisd, ...)
Temperature OK?
Systems up: Taro, Pepper, Pumpkin/Corn ?
Backups:
1. Did backup succeed?
2. Does Lentil need a new disk?

Important

Towards a stable setup

Here are some options:

Test VMware server (See VMWare Progress). Specifically, I would like to know:

1. How easy is it to move a VM from one hardware to another? (Can you simply move the disks?) Yes.
2. Specifically, if you need to service some hardware, can you move the host to other hardware with little down time? (Clearly not for large disk arrays, like pumpkin, but that is storage, not hosts). Considering portability of disks/files, the downtime is the time it takes to move the image around and start up on another machine.
3. Do we need a RedHat license for each VM or do we only need a license for the host, as with Xen? It seems to consume a license per VM. Following this didn't work for the VMWare systems. The closes thing to an official word that I could find was this.
4. VMware allows for "virtual appliances", but how good are these really? Are these fast enough?

Because not all of our systems are RHEL, we should look into some management solution like spacewalk.
Also, func looks like a nice tool to fiddle with.
Matt's working on setting up cobbler to ease system installation.

Miscellaneous

Learn about NIS so we're ready for Silas' cluster.
Look over code for wigner print control, or look into papercut
Finish setting up blackbody and lisemeitner.
Get transana stuff working for Dawn/Chris.
Contact that guy in space science about a backup server swap.
Look at moving the virtual machines to VMWare on einstein.
- Get a dedicated VMWare drive working. Maybe two, so that we've got a mirror in case a drive fails we don't end up losing all our VMs?
Look at VMWare appliance-style monitoring solutions, like cacti or splunk, or even something else.
Upgrade Calarco's windows machine's RAM
Fix EVO webcam video on Sarah's computer.
Fix front sound output on Sarah's computer.
Determine a better organization system for cables, parts, etc. Junky cardboard boxes are a bit cumbersome, and they look bad.
We should look into what software is necessary on what machines, for disk space concerns. I'm thinking of Pepper in particular, do we really want openoffice data taking up an eighth of the root partition?
Get the rest of the paulis up. Looks like NIS is in the way on at least one of them. Update to LDAP will be necessary. A workaround can be to make a local jhh user on each, and point its home directory to /net/home/jhh. Not the most elegant solution, but the fact that NIS was around seems to have blocked LDAP from working properly. Do we even need the paulis anymore? Is silas giving some computational space to Jochen?
Fix some of the older workstations (hobo, ennui, etc.)
Monitoring: I would like to see the new temp-monitor integrated with Cacti, and fix some of the cacti capabilities, i.e. tie it in with the sensors output from pepper and taro (and tomato/einstein). Setup sensors on the corn/pumpkin. Have an intelligent way in which we are warned when conditions are too hot, a drive has failed, a system is down. I'm starting to get the hang of getting this sort of data via snmp. I wrote a perl script that pulls the temperature data from the environmental monitor, as well as some nice info from einstein. We SHOULD be able to integrate a rudimentary script like this into cacti or splunk, getting a bit closer to an all-in-one monitoring solution. It's in Matt's home directory, under code/npgmon/
Check into smartd monitoring (and processing its output) on Pepper, Taro, Corn/Pumpkin, Einstein, Tomato (Actually, all the systems).

Ongoing

Documentation

Maintain the Documentation of all systems!
- Main function
- Hardware
- OS
- Network
Continue homogenizing the configurations of the machines.

Maintenance

Check e-mails to root every morning
Check up on security [1]

On-the-Side

Backup stuff: We need exclude filters on the backups. We need to plan and execute extensive tests before modifying the production backup program. Also, see if we can implement some sort of NFS user access. I've set up both filters and read-only snapshot access to backups at home. Uses what essentially amounts to a bash script version of the fancy perl thing we use now, only far less sophisticated. However, the filtering and user access uses a standard rsync exclude file (syntax in man page) and the user access is fairly obvious NFS read-only hosting. I am wondering if this is needed. The current scheme (ie the perl script) uses excludes by having a .rsync-filter is each of the directories where you want excluded contents. This has worked well. See ~maurik/tmp/.rsync-filter . The current script takes care of some important issues, like incomplete backups. Ah. So we need to get users to somehow keep that .rsync-filter file fairly updated. And to get them to use data to hold things, not home. Also, I wasn't suggesting we get rid of the perl script, I was saying that I've become familiar with a number of the things it does. [2]
Continue purgin NIS from ancient workstations, and replacing with files. The following remain:
- pauli nodes -- Low priority!

Waiting

Move pauli8 drives into pauli5 so that Heisenberg can access his data. The raid array on them has been rebuilt, but there seems to be weird behaviour with LVM or something related.

Completed

Set up UPS monitoring for each UPS. It works! Einstein even cleanly shuts down when the power is critically low.
Bohr is slow with PDFs. Maybe time to put a newer distro on bohr? He's using RHEL4. It's good enough for now, and he hasn't mentioned it again.
Gourd is giving smartd errors. Should we be concerned at all, since nobody uses it anymore? People do use it, just not all that often. Once Lorenzo's graduated and everyone straightens out their data, we can evaluate our data storage setup.
Set up signal generator software on lab computer.
Set up USB oscilloscope software on lab computer.
Get familiar with denyhosts.
Learn how to use cacti using a VM appliance. Now unnecessary, since we run cacti directly on roentgen.