The dedicated hardware for the OVSD servers came in last week. Yay! Time to have some fun wrangling the new hardware.

With Ben’s welcome assistance, we got the boxes racked up and physically connected in record time. In the past I’ve run most of my servers on Ubuntu/Debian or Red Hat/Fedora but the sysadmins at the OSL use Cfengine and Gentoo. No problem, I think, it’s good to learn new things and Cfengine sounds interesting. So the guys stuck a Gentoo LiveCD into the first box for me, I rolled up my sleeves and waded in.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cracked open fdisk and partitioned a system’s drives by hand. Whoa. I think it was sometime in the late ’90s on a floppy-based Slackware install. Not a bad thing, bit it was the first indication of just how lazy I’ve gotten since then. I’d just been booting of the CD, running through the standard boot CD-based utilities (ala Disk Druid and its ilk) to partition/format the drives and install the base OS. Nope, not happening this time. The bootstrapping process isn’t complicated or difficult - and it certainly didn’t require much (beyond the Cfengine-specific stuff) that I haven’t done before - it’s just I haven’t done them manually in years.

Which leads to my little “whoops!” moment. These are HP Proliant servers with Compaq RAID cards in them. Unlilke every other RAID card I’ve dealt with, they don’t show the RAID arrays on /dev/sd(x). Spent a few minutes thrashing around trying to figure out why fdisk /dev/sda wasn’t working before Eric so kindly pointed out the proper /dev/cciss/c0d0 device path. (MutterMutterGrumbleGrumble).

Once I figured that bit out, things went pretty smoothly. I like what Cfengine can do and appreciate just how much work it can save when managing multiple servers. It’s a bit arcane at first, but once I got used to the logic it generally makes sense. Now that I think about it, the same can be said for Gentoo. Logical, very granular control, not necessarily the easiest to learn for an inexperienced user, and ideal for optimizing and securing servers.

Both Gentoo and Cfengine force you to adhere to good admin practices like only installing the bare minimum services and locking down the configs. All definitely Good Things ™ like vegetables and fiber but, dang, it highlights just how lazy one can get when the distro installer and package manager do all the work. So don’t mind all that muttering coming from my cube about emerge and Cfengine configs. It’s just me grumbling about having to eat my vegetables.