On the State of High Availability
Recently, while trying to set up a small failover cluster of servers, I found myself scouring for a lot of answers. This struck me as strange, however it seems high-availability lacks momentum in the open source community.
Csistck 0.06
I cleaned up some bugs and finally bumped to 0.06 release. This is the stable release that is usable, but there are still some trivial bugs. Planned for 0.7: more package management, better logging on terminal, including possibly detecting terminals with color output -- maybe.
You can also check out the code on bitbucket
Pkgsrc Build Server
Running several pkgsrc boxes on top of Rackspace Cloud, all which use the same kernel and release, it makes a lot of sense to build binary packages once, on a single machine. The easiest way to do this is to have a dedicated build server -- something which is very simple in a cloud hosting environment.
Managing Passwords, Forget Them
As a system administrator, I have tried many different methods of remembering passwords for several dozen servers worth of root account passwords, MySQL passwords, and user account passwords. Instead of remembering these passwords, or even storing a password list encrypted somewhere, I eventually started generating password hashes using various algoritms. This iteration of the script uses bcrypt and a passphrase to generate hashed and salted passwords.
NetBSD Pkgsrc on Linux
There are several reasons for running pkgsrc on top of Linux, one reason being a common package management, and common packages for server daemons across a mixed environment of Linux distributions and FreeBSD or NetBSD boxes. I use Debian Squeeze with pkgsrc, and had limited success with Centos 5.5 and pkgsrc, however I would like to test Centos 6, now that it is finally released, as well as outline my build process for my server cluster. Hopefully I will time soon. For now:
Csistck Examples
Csistck is a configuration automation tool, similiar in theory to Chef. I have started to add a few examples of how I use Csistck to manage my own servers.
I included a basic example of how I deploy csistck maintenance scripts across a large number of hosts, using Fabric. The example uses git, as I use that internally.