Sysadmin 2gos plan

From DGC Wiki

2GOS

2nd Generation Operating System

The OS setup we used last year was ad-hoc, hobbled together, but worked. The design philosophy was that if we had n computers and n-1 failed, one would still work and hopefully be able to move the vehicle. Accordingly, no server/client relationships were established amongst the computers. What happened was that 0 computers failed, but the distributed nature was difficult to maintain. This year we will have a very unified management, using tools such as NFS, NIS, and cfengine. This document describes my first run at creating this system.

Hardware

The race computers will eventually be some as yet unaquired servers. I am now installing the system on uranium. However, the same management system will be used for the old race computers, laptops, desktops, servers, etc. See Sysadmin_cfengine_plan\cfengine for details.

Procedure

This is a blow by blow of what I did, so it can be repeated.

1. Install Slackware 10.0

 a.	Format /dev/hda2 as 124 sectors for swap at the end of the disk
 b.	Format /dev/hda1 as everything else (40GB total), bootable, at the beginning of the disk.
 c.	Format /dev/hda1 as ext3, 4096 blocksize
 d.	Install all packages from both CDs except kdei.
 e.    Disable hotplug for speed. (should be enabled on a laptop).
 f.	Set the following services to run at boot:

rc.inetd rc.portmap rc.syslog rc.sshd

 g.	Hardware clock to local time
 h.	gnome as default window manager.

2.

 a.	get db4-4.1.25-i386-1.tgz from toughguy or grandchallenge and install it.
 b.	get cfengine-2.1.6-i486-1 from grandchallenge and install it
 c.	fetch cfagent.conf from grandchallenge and install it at /var/cfengine/inputs/cfagent.conf

This is as far as I have gotten.