The five latest open source tools for Distributed System Administrators

The five latest open source tools for Distributed System Administrators
The remote distributed system management team is able to solve emergencies at any time by virtue of the huge advantage of crossing the world's time zones. It also brings a richer pool of talent for enterprises to use. In terms of specific tools, let's take a look at the five open source collaboration solutions selected by the OpenStack global infrastructure team.

1. Text Communication

We use the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) provided by freenode. Open-source clients that can be connected to freenode are diverse. With its help, we can discuss problems and challenges, build solutions, notify progress changes, and release project status changes and warnings at any time, the robot was set up to be responsible for submitting the infrastructure changes to be reviewed. The IRC channel we use is completely open, and a dedicated channel record server is set up for users to view at any time.

The following is a short chat history of our channel one morning:

  <clarkb>hrm no world dump on that failure?   <openstackgerrit> Anita Kuno proposed openstack-infra/storyboard: Add example commands for the Timeline api https://review.openstack.org/337854   <openstackgerrit> Victor Ryzhenkin proposed openstack-infra/project-config: Add openstack/fuel-plugin-murano-tests project https://review.openstack.org/332151   <clarkb> its definitely an io error of some sort   <clarkb> possibly run out of disk space?   <therve> The df output looks normal...   <greghaynes> or, is it writing out to tmpfs?

When you get started, you may feel a little uncomfortable, but the conversation and log Content here will become our valuable resource.

In addition, when the bandwidth is sufficient, we also choose to make Voice calls-we chose the Asterisk System to support Voice over IP (VoIP) calls.

It is very common to run private IRCd in an enterprise or an organization, and such open-source options are also very good. You can choose as needed. If your team prefers to use modern interfaces and functions, we recommend that you select Mattermost.

2. Etherpad

Etherpads is a hosted collaborative text editor that allows team teams to edit the same file in real time. Our team has used it for multiple purposes: Collaborating based on the overall project announcement, sharing personal ideas, views and topics, compiling maintenance and upgrade plans, and executing tasks through the maintenance window.

We usually use Etherpad in collaboration with IRC, where etablet acts as the note synchronization platform where we will discuss and record all important information. In addition, we use open-source Etherpad Lite in our own infrastructure.

3. Pastebin

Pastebin allows you to paste a large amount of text. It returns a URL for us to share with other team members. In our team, this means that Members can easily share log fragments without accessing the server. In fact, we often combine Pastebin with the IRC channel, or provide read-only text content through Etherpad.

Currently, multiple open-source projects can achieve Pastebin sharing. We currently use LodgeIt. If you are computing and running open pastebin, you can use the robots.txt file to prevent the content from being retrieved by the search engine.

4. GNU Screen

As a solution officially called terminal multiplexing, GNU Screen allows you to run commands in terminal sessions and ensure that the application continues to run after logging out. This capability is very effective when we manage long-running commands that need to be manually triggered. Most team members use it to ensure that our IRC client can run 24/7 around the clock.

More interestingly, we also use the GNU Screen session to help team members learn system management skills. Some users in the system can also attach a screen session to implement terminal session Collaboration. Here, we can provide new members with access password values or share complex maintenance task execution procedures.

Of course, you can also choose other options as needed. After all, GNU Screen is relatively thin in terms of modern functions. Options include tmux and Byobu.

5. Git

The Git project was originally established by Linux Torvalds for Linux kernel management development. Git has become the most popular version control system in the open-source project field. Every system management team should use this version control solution to manage infrastructure changes. For cross-time zone teams, it is often difficult to find the appropriate eight hours for everyone. At this time, Git can help members view the changes in the system, so as to understand what the partner at the other end of the earth did while they were sleeping.

In addition, we can easily roll back the status, or at least view the normal status before the deployment of destructive changes. In addition, we can describe the content and reasons of each change.

Tip: as an administrator, you must specify the reason for the change when submitting the change-after all, several weeks or even months later, even the person who submitted the change may not remember why he did it.

From: http:// OS .51cto.com/art/201608/515402.htm

Address: http://www.linuxprobe.com/distributed-support-tools.html