Fall 2008 - MP351 (1 Credit) & MP352 (2 Credits)
Roles
- ITL Director
- Windows Build Maintainer
- Network Administrator
- Member of CS Labs Admin. Board
- Server Setup / Services Admin.
Projects - End of Semester Summary
Active Directory
As mentioned in my mid-semester summary, I reimplmented AD from scratch this semester. For the rest of the semester, I have continued to tweak it as needed. This included forcing wait for network on boot and forcing the csguest profile to be deleted on logout for all the lab PCs. The downfall of this though is the lab machines take about 1 ½ minutes to get to a login screen when booted into Windows; however, I will fix this next semester by setting most of the group policy items locally on the PC rather than forcing them all down through AD. The only other issues I have run into are with VMware server and the host it is running on. The main issue is the load values spike randomly out of control after about two weeks of uptime. Hopefully I can do more research into the issue and get it resolved for next semester.
Autoguilt
I joined this project to learn more about PHP, MySQL, and Drupal but haven't contributed any because the project hasn't been very active all semester.
CS Labs Website
Not much has changed since mid-semester but in the next few weeks I hope to lower the quality of some of the images so that the site loads faster on slow connections. I also am planning to redirect the site that resides on web2/AFS to http://cslabs.clarkson.edu since the labs have full control over that site/domain.
Mail / Mailing List Server
I started this project after we decided to scrap Zimbra in the labs. I was originally planning to run an install of mailman and some mail service to allow people to have cslabs.clarkson.edu email addresses; however, after creating both a new CentOS 5.2 mail and mail.dev VM and getting mailman installed (but not working correctly), I decided to scrap both of those today. Instead, I chose to have the cslabs.clarkson.edu MX records point to Google's servers and signed us up for Google Apps for Education. I'm currently have that fully set up but some minor tweaking is needed and accounts for people need to be created. The major benefit of using Google Apps for Education is that it will create allow users to have @cslabs.clarkson.edu email addresses, @cslabs mailing addresses, generic emails for different things like mirroradmin@cslabs.clarkson.edu, and much much more. The other major benefit is the fact that most of the server administration is handled by Google and we only have to keep the DNS stuff and MX records up.
Network Status Server
The major change I made to the netstat VM this semester was the reorganization of the nagios configs which I mentioned in my mid-semester status. I have also configured it to monitor almost everything in the labs except about 4 VMs which I'm waiting for access to still. I've also upgraded Nagios several times to the latest version as they have been released. The most recent time being December 1st. I've also set up Nagios to monitor the Render Farm server so that we are notified when the render farm goes down. I've also modified the render farm Nagios install to monitor the netstat VM so that the render farm will notify us if it goes down or if there are network problems in the labs like earlier in the semester.
New Web Server VMs
A few weeks ago, I finally created two VMs (web1 and web1.dev) but apache isn't running or configured on them yet. I will probably work on these in the coming weeks/next semester. The primary purpose of these VMs will be to move static websites like xen.cslabs, rrs.cslabs, etc. to it and allow for additional static websites instead of creating a new VM every time someone wanted to have a static project page site. The web1 VM will also host the new cslabs.clarkson.edu website which is basically the current site at http://www.clarkson.edu/projects/cslabs/.
Render Farm Project
So many things have happened with the render farm but they are on halt at the moment due to finals. Since mid-semester I built the render farm master server and one of the clients. The render farm master runs DrQueue, Nagios, DHCP/DNS, and hosts all the storage for the render farm. At the moment though, we are in the process of getting DrQueue working correctly and working on installing Maya on the render farm master (so we can actually render things). We are also working on a second front with Chris Hawkins and might end up using his clustering software with DrQueue and Maya to run the render farm mainly because all the slaves would network boot and adding additional slaves would be as simple as plugging them in.
Server Management
For the remainder of the semester, I have been continuing to help manage all the servers in the lab. As mentioned previously, this including getting most everything monitored by Nagios, setting up AWstats for each web server, and maintaining Active Directory and all the Windows Servers in the labs. One recent thing I have done though is I created a generic CentOS 5.2 VM to be used with our current Xen infrastructure which I then used to create the new web1 VMs and the mail VMs which I have not scraped. I also removed all non necessary VMs from the server room network for security reasons and locked down most of the VMs to only allow ssh from the 145 net or isengard. I also power things back up when we have random power outages like this past weekend.
Windows Lab Build
Not much has changed recently but I did set the csguest profile to delete on log out. I also updated all the machines to be sure they were protected from the recent rpc vulnerability. I've also ghosted machines and brought them over to OIT for repair as needed. I'm planning to continue working on the build again next semester since I haven't had time train Bob yet but will have more time to train him next semester to take over maintaining the build.
Future Projects
VPN Server
I still intend to implement a VPN server; however, I was unable to achieve it this semester due to time constraints and higher priority items I wanted to achieve in the labs. I will most likely work on this over winter break or early next semester.
ESXi, VMware Infrastructure, HyperV & KVM
I still need to try out all of these at some point. I will most likely try them out early next semester.
Windows Server 2008
I still plan to try it out very soon. I will most likely install it on the blade that I am currently using. I will probably try it out early next semester.
New ITL Website
There still is no new website; however, Roger Ignazio has taken the role of Web Site Maintainer for the labs and will be designing a new COSI & ITL site very shortly.
Open Solaris
Very shortly I hope to begin learning/using Open Solaris mainly since we may be using it in the new server setup because of ZFS and it would be good experience for me to have
Projects - Mid-Semester Summary
Active Directory
This semester I reimplemented AD from scratch. I decided that I would like to virtualize as many of the Windows Servers as possible to consolidate them and make them easy to backup. I also discovered better ways to implement AD which allowed me to create the Active Directory domain ad.cslabs.clarkson.edu which is accessable on both the Clarkson network and internal network. In the past, the domain had only been accessible on the internal network and used an invalid name of cslabs.sclab.clarkson.edu.
Autoguilt
I just recently joined the Autoguilt project in hopes of learning more about PHP/MySQL in general and to learn better practices when using PHP.
CS Labs Website
I have continued to make sure the site is functional and reasonably up-to-date. I recently implemented Google Analytics since we cannot implement AWStats for this particual site. In the future, I'm planning to lower the quality of the images to improve page load times on slower connections and I'm hoping to modify the main image size to be smaller so the content on the page is not so far on the bottom.
Network Status Server
I have done many things in the past few months to the network status server. I implemented AWStats to track website usage but currently need to revisit this to get all sites being tracked and to upgrade to the latest version. I also still need to get htmldoc working properly so that monthy website usage reports can be published to pdfs and emailed to the admin board. I have also heavily reorganized Nagios so that hosts should be easier to add from now on and I consolidated from about 40 or so config files to about 7 or 8. In the future, I hope to have a page to display a list of running VMs on each of our dom0s, have UPS stats for each UPS available on the server, and install Cacti to graph network usage, CPU usage, memory usage, etc. on each host.
Render Farm Project
I coordinated the first meetings for this project to get it started at the beginning of the semester. So far the team has acquired all the PCs for the farm, networking, a cart, power, and monitors so that we can begin setting up the farm. Roger did some inital work with setting up Dr Queue on Ubuntu Server but since then Roger has determined the correct way to set up the farm and has asked me to do a CentOS build for the PCs which I will be doing very shortly.
Server Management
Once again this semester I have done tons of server management. I helped salvage things remotely over the summer when a drive was removed from the RAID units. I also have continued to maintain righteous, the dhcp/dns servers in the labs, the gateway server (isengard), worked on the network status server, created some new VMs like netstat.dev to be used for development, and the downtime VM which is used to put up a temporary page in the event of different services/websites being down. I also redeployed all of the Windows Servers which included a new AD server, new File Server, and new Ghost Server. I also set up two new VMware servers which run CentOS 5 with VMware Server. I also help maintain the current setup with Animal and the blades and recently produced a CentOS 5.2 xen image to be used to create CentOS domUs on our current setup. I've also worked at getting everything monitored by Nagios, improving the security of our infrastructure, and keeping things up-to-date. I also intend to be the main coordinator for the setup of the new hardware we have ordered.
Windows Lab Build
This semester I once again produced a new Windows build for each machine in the labs including the Alienware which was always left alone in the past. So for the first time there is a nearly identical build on all the PCs which run Windows and there is central logon because of them being on the ad.cslabs.clarkson.edu domain. Over the rest of the semester I'm planning to fix any issues with the build and train Bob Appleton to essentially take over maintaining most of the build so that I can play a less time demand role in the build
Future Projects
VPN Server
Implement a VPN server to get on the 144 net in the labs, the internal network, or the server room network.
Mail / Mailing List Server
Implement a mailing list server using mailman and optionally set up something minimal to allow people to have either @cosi.clarkson.edu or @cslabs.clarkson.edu email addresses
New Web Server VMs
Implement a new development and production web server VM to support either a new COSI website or the current one. Presently the COSI VM which hosts planet.cosi and the COSI website is badly screwed up and we are extremely lucky it is still serving the site without issues.
ESXi, VMware Infrastructure, HyperV & KVM
Try out all of these Virtualization options
Windows Server 2008
Try out server 2008 and Active Directory in server 08.
New ITL Website
Implement a new ITL website if I have the time