[CentOS] Server test suite

Fri May 1 16:55:15 UTC 2009
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

Russell Miller wrote:
> On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 9:32 AM, nate <centos at linuxpowered.net> wrote:
>
>> What kinds of things are on the checklist? Perhaps you can use something
>> like cfengine or puppet to do this. cfengine essentially runs a checklist
>> for me every hour on every system and enforces the rules I have set in
>> it(roughly 15,000 lines of configuration).
>>
>> puppet seems to be the new hot thing though I've not had any time
>> or interest to look into it myself cfengine does everything I need.
>>
> We do use puppet to configure the systems.  Problem is that there's an
> institutional reluctance to run it in that way - it's done right now
> as a "push" configuration.  So I would like to find something that can
> validate in a read-only way and send alerts when things are a little
> off.

Not sure if puppet has something similar but in cfengine I could do this:

[root at us-cfe002:~]# cfagent -v -q -n 2>&1 | grep -i need
Need: Update of image /var/cfengine/inputs/common/openmq_base.conf from
master /nfs/exnas/root/cfengine/configs/common/openmq_base.conf on localhost
Need: Update of image /etc/sudoers from master
/nfs/exnas/root/cfengine/files/common/redhat/etc/sudoers on localhost
Need this: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_openmq wasn't at destination (copying)
Need this: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_openmq_sudo wasn't at destination
(copying)
Need this: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_derby wasn't at destination (copying)
Need this: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_derby_sudo wasn't at destination
(copying)
Need this: /etc/nagios/nrpe.d/check_openmq.cfg wasn't at destination (copying)
Need this: /etc/nagios/nrpe.d/check_derby.cfg wasn't at destination (copying)


cfagent -v -q -n 2>&1 | grep -i need >/tmp/cfe.check && cat /tmp/cfe.check |
mail -s "Alert on `hostname`"  user at host

Of course you could make a little bigger script to send something
more descriptive in the email.

>
> While I'm at it, I'd also like something that can keep a database of
> all of the packages installed on all of the servers and let me do
> queries against it...  don't want to write it if there's already
> something out there.

I think red hat satellite server can do this(I think, it uses an
Oracle DB to store data so you could query that), I think they released
an open source version of it -

http://www.redhat.com/spacewalk/

I have not used either personally.

nate