-
I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
-people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
-could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
-funded
-developer
-gathering. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
-of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
-issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
-asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
-upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.
-
-
Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
-process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
-boot:
-
-
-
-- Use dash as /bin/sh.
-
-- Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
- clock is in UTC.
-
-- Install and activate the insserv package to enable
- dependency
- based boot sequencing, and enable concurrent booting.
-
-
-
-These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
-
Carlos
-Villegas.
-
-
Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
-unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
-from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
-declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
-where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
-using this.
-
-
On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
-introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
-startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
-from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
-possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
-this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
-insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)
+
One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
+Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
+days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
+Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
+analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
+further.
+
+
When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
+configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
+configured to be a server for the
+SiteSummary
+system I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
+system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
+work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
+information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
+computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
+automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
+which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
+packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
+and Nagios configuration.
+
+
All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
+munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
+client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
+up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.
+
+
All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
+automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
+services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
+the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
+sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
+raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
+the machine.
+
+
The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
+based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
+with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
+keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.
+
+
The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
+is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
+administrator need to run "htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
+nagiosadmin" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
+it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
+everything is taken care of.