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        <channel>
                <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries tagged sitesummary</title>
                <description>Entries tagged sitesummary</description>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>

        
        <item>
                <title>Setting up a new school with Debian Edu/Squeeze</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Setting_up_a_new_school_with_Debian_Edu_Squeeze.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;The next version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.skolelinux.org/&quot;&gt;Debian Edu
/ Skolelinux&lt;/a&gt; will include a new tool
&lt;tt&gt;sitesummary2ldapdhcp&lt;/tt&gt;, which can be used to quickly set up all
the computers in a school without much manual labour.  Here is a short
summary on how to use it to set up a new school.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
central server in the network.  Next, PXE boot all the client machines
as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
allow the clients to report their existence to the central server.  When
this is done, log on to the central server and run
&lt;tt&gt;sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a&lt;/tt&gt; in the &lt;tt&gt;konsole&lt;/tt&gt; to use the
collected information to generate system objects in LDAP.  The output
will look similar to this:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
% sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a
info: Updating machine tjener.intern [10.0.2.2] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:05.
info: Create GOsa machine for auto-mac-00-01-02-03-04-06 [10.0.16.20] id ether-00:01:02:03:04:06.

Enter password if you want to activate these changes, and ^c to abort.

Connecting to LDAP as cn=admin,ou=ldap-access,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
enter password: *******
% 
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
automatically generated names.  The final step to set up the school is
then to log into &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/&quot;&gt;GOsa&lt;/a&gt;,
the web based user, group and system administration system to change
system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
enable DHCP and DNS for the systems.  All clients that should be used
as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
group.  After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
and get their assigned names and group based configuration
automatically.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
enabled this weekend.  You might want to give it a try.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
hosts, one need to add the option -a.  I forgot to mention this in my
original text, and have added it to the text now.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing computer hardware models used at site</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_computer_hardware_models_used_at_site.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Thu, 3 Jun 2010 12:05:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
information extracted from each machine.  The script to do so is
included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
the Skolelinux build servers:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
maintainer:~# /usr/lib/sitesummary/hardware-model-summary
  vendor                    count
  Dell Computer Corporation     1
    PowerEdge 1750              1
  IBM                           1
    eserver xSeries 345 -[8670M1X]-     1
  Intel                         2
  [no-dmi-info]                 3
maintainer:~#
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
provided in each machine.  Here there are Intel machines without model
information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
machines listed as [no-dmi-info].  One can add -l as a command line
option to list the individual machines.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A larger list is
&lt;a href=&quot;http://narvikskolen.no/sitesummary/&quot;&gt;available from the the
city of Narvik&lt;/a&gt;, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
provide the basic sitesummary report publicly.  In their report there
are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
collector.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Sitesummary tip: Listing MAC address of all clients</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sitesummary_tip__Listing_MAC_address_of_all_clients.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Fri, 14 May 2010 21:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;sitesummary
system&lt;/a&gt; is used to keep track of the machines in the school
network.  Each machine will automatically report its status to the
central server after boot and once per night.  The network setup is
also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines.  This is useful
to update the DHCP configuration.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary.  Run
this on the collector host:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;pre&gt;
perl -MSiteSummary -e &#39;for_all_hosts(sub { print join(&quot; &quot;, get_macaddresses(shift)), &quot;\n&quot;; });&#39;
&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
tables in LDAP using this information.  Such tool is unfortunately not
written yet.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
        </item>
        
        <item>
                <title>Automatic Munin and Nagios configuration</title>
                <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html</link>        
                <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_Munin_and_Nagios_configuration.html</guid>
                <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
                <description>&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary&quot;&gt;SiteSummary
system&lt;/a&gt; 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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;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 &quot;&lt;tt&gt;htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
nagiosadmin&lt;/tt&gt;&quot; 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.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
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