The machine insanity of Thomas Krichel

Introduction

I have too many machines. They do too many things. I am loosing track of all they do. I wrote this page to keep track of things. I am grateful to Angela Cornwell who first suggested to write it. After reading this document, you will understand my inner world. You will also understand why I look so worried most of the time.

General setup

Every machine should have a root crontab that saves the state of the machine with

dpkg --get-selections > /root/machine.selected

where machine is the name of the machine. This will allow to rebuild the machine, and to clone a machine quite easily.

A cmabu is a complete machine backup. It contains all the data thta is require to reconstruct a machine, apart from the backups that were held on the machine. A machine A cmabues machine B if, on the /opt/B directory on A, machine A holds backups of the /etc/, /var/, /home/, and /root directories of B. If A cmabues B, then B is said to be cmabued by A.

Machines

trabbi

This is my private laptop. It provides no services to the world as such. But a web server at http://trabbi.openlib.org, just for me to have my onw homepage.

fafner

This is a machine at lilrc where Gerry Arthus has direct access to it.

It features a 40G drive mounted as / and an lvm out of three 80G disks mounted as /opt. Yes, there is a lot of backup space on this machine.

It is cmabued by mutabor, according to fafner's /root/etc/crontab.

It cmabues wotan, with the exeption of /home/adocis. Wotan' /home/adocis is copied without the deletion flag to /opt/wotan/home/adocis, on the 13th of every month. This is known as the DoCIS junk accumulator. All this is activated by fafner's /root/etc/crontab.

It cmabues mutabor, according to its /root/etc/crontab.

It runs the openlib.org mailing lists.

It runs the primary DNS for openlib.org in its binder account. raneb, snefru, and utserv.mcc.ac.uk are the secondaries.

Services

The legacy web web services netec.mcc.ac.uk and netec.wustl.edu are run from raneb on the adnetec accout. This is rsynced by raneb to fafner as /opt/raneb/home/adrepec.