It has been a while…

It has been a while since I last expressed myself and shared thoughts with the world via techslaves.org. Time to change that.

So what is new?

For the first time in 5.5 years, I am single and living totally, utterly alone. This is a big change that I am learning to deal with day by day.  Thankfully, I find myself busy enough that there isn’t a lot of downtime for me to dwell on negativity. I have challenged myself to use this as an opportunity to self-evaluate and change the things that I find which I do not like. I call it “Continuous Improvement”.

I recently achieved my goal of commuting by bicycle for 100 consecutive work days. I then promptly took several days off due to a series of crashes caused by the “winter” conditions here that quickly fade away. I’m now back in the saddle riding everyday and it feels great. 22km of cycling a day does the body good.

Professionally, my interest in cfengine and IT operations has been steadily increasing.

My adventures with cfengine have led to much pondering over the “meta topics” of configuration management such as the release management aspect (version controlled workflow for updating, authorizing and installing policy) and policy writing best practices such as file copy vs. file edit and policy layout/design. It is these meta topics that I find most immediately challenging when considering cfengine deployment. Learning from others, I have developed a release management workflow of sorts. Perhaps it will eventually be of quality enough to share.

With regards to IT operations, I’ve been invigorated by the LISA ’11 talks available on YouTube. These talks exposed me to several (new-ish and old) books and authors that I am now exploring and enjoying. Some favorites so far are “The Visible Ops Handbook” and “Future Shock”. I am just getting started with “Lean IT”.

Speaking of LISA, I am now registered for the Cascadia IT Conference held March 23 and 24th this year in Seattle, WA. I am super excited to meet my fellow LOPSA members (and semi-local sysadmins) that I normally only interact with via the #lopsa and #lopsa-lounge IRC channels! Hopefully the employer professional development funds can cover the registration fees… but the conference is so close to fiscal year-end and the fund might be exhausted before HR reviews my application for reimbursement. Fingers crossed.

Aside from new interests in system administration but remaining in the professional sphere, there is also an excellent potential opportunity for a new position with my current employer available to me. I don’t regard anything as set in stone so tonight I will gear up and put in my application ASAP. Some very excellent key people are waiting for it to hit their desks and I will not disappoint!

I will make no promises with regards to new content… but let it be known, techslaves.org lives!

Cfengine 3 Snippets Part 2: sudo

It’s been a while since I’ve really had time to delve too much further into cfengine 3 since my previous post on the subject way back in May but I do have another simple example to share. This time it’s about managing your sudo policy via the sudoers file.

The example is that of a very, very basic sudoers policy but the principles are easily extended to create much more complex policy. The general idea here is that we want cfengine to ensure that specific rules are always in place. Instructed properly, cfengine accomplishes this very well.

Warning: I don’t know anything. I’m just someone learning cfengine 3 and posting about it. If I’m wrong about something, let me know! If you find this at all useful, be my guest. That is all.

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Cfengine 3 Snippets Part 1: DenyHosts

I’ve recently begun looking into configuration management with cfengine 3. I’ve ignored this growing sub-field of system administration for too long and I just can’t ignore it anymore. After spending quite some time researching the philosophies, methods and different tools out there, I settled on starting out with cfengine 3. There’s no special reason that I chose cfengine instead of puppet, bcfg2, chef or AutomateIT. I haven’t used any of these tools and thus I cannot pass judgement on them or their methods. All these projects seem to have intelligent and highly motivated people behind them. I simply gravitated towards cfengine because of its strong academic background and the fact that version 3 now represents the most recent and modern research in the field by Mark Burgess et. al.

As part of my learning experience with cfengine, I’ve decided to start posting some of the code that I’ve begun developing in the hopes that by writing about it, I can learn better, faster and maybe even receive some helpful comments from readers along the way. Beware, I’m a cfengine newbie and so what I post here should NOT be copy and pasted into your environment unless you’re ok with the potential of wildly breaking things!

The first snippet of code I want to discuss is related to managing our DenyHosts configuration. As part of our “security policy”, I would like to ensure that every RedHat/CentOS system is running a properly configured DenyHosts instance. Here is what I’ve come up with so far.

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