BSDCan2009 - Final Release

BSDCan 2009
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Ivan Voras
Schedule
Day Talks - 1 - 2009-05-08
Room MRT 256
Start time 16:00
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 115
Event type Lecture
Track System Administration
Language used for presentation English

Remote and mass management of systems with finstall

Automated management on a largish scale

An important part of the "finstall" project, created as a graphical installer for FreeBSD, is a configuration server that can be used to remotely administer and configure arbitrary systems. It allows for remote scripting of administration tasks and is flexible enough to support complete reconfiguration of running systems.

The finstall project has two major parts – the front-end and the back-end. The front-end is just a GUI allowing the users to install the system in a convenient way. The back-end is a network-enabled XML-RPC server that is used by the front-end to perform its tasks. It can be used as a stand-alone configuration daemon. This talk will describe a way to make use of this property of finstall to remotely manage large groups of systems.