Re: [BLUG] Program/Suite for passing jobs between machines?

On Mar 19, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Mark Krenz wrote:

>
> That's a good example of what you start out with. But eventually
> what
> happens is that other people need to help create/maintain users
> (freeing
> up the sysadmin a bit). If you want to write something like a web
> control panel, how do you handle passing requests safely between hosts
> and having dependencies, handling failure properly and so on?
>
> At Suso, I'm doing a lot of custom things beyond what something like
> useradd can do and we'll be doing a lot more that prevents us from
> using
> things like Cpanel, Plesk, etc. So I have to write my own. But what
> nobody seems to tackle is the task of safely passing jobs and
> information between servers, without just writing a hack. This is what
> Mcfeely was aiming at (http://www.kiva.net/~systhug/mcfeely/). I
> would
> think that systems like this would be as prevent as window managers on
> Freshmeat, but there appear to be none.
>

It would seem to me that the big challenge here is generalizing enough
to be useful in many different environments, without becoming too
complex in the process. There are a few different approaches here:
SOAP interfaces, XML, a dedicated specialized service, and then on top
of this many different languages that various environments aim to
standardize on. It would be very difficult, I think, to write an Apple-
style "just add water" service along these lines, nor should you, but
then at this point the question becomes whether there is a reasonable
ROI in going the extra mile to generalize enough so that the tool has
the potential to be useful in other environments. Does this make sense?

> Mark
>
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 01:42:08PM GMT, Simón Ruiz [simon.a.ruiz@gmail.com
> ] said the following:
>> We use a tiny BASH script to create Samba users on our domain
>> controller, which all workstations authenticate off of, and then fire
>> off an ssh "useradd -m $username" to the mail server if it's a new
>> staff person.
>>
>> It's about the simplest, puniest example of what you're talking
>> about,
>> but since more than 99% of people here only log in to workstations,
>> and the rest of us are sysadmins, it works.
>>
>> Simón
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 8:49 AM, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:
>>> Anyone have any input?
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark Krenz
>>> Bloomington Linux Users Group
>>> http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
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>>
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>
> --
> Mark Krenz
> Bloomington Linux Users Group
> http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
>
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