[TriLUG] status of TriLUG server blitzkrieg

[Chris Hedemark]

[Copied to trilug at trilug.org but in-depth discussion probably belongs on
sys at trilug.org (mailing list for discussion of TriLUG hosted services)]

Tanner & I just completed another few hours of work on the donated
hardware.  While we did have some disappointments, overall I am pleased
with the outcome of this weekend's work.

What we have accomplished:
* We have a working Kerberos/LDAP server (moya.trilug.org).  UID/GID,
shell preference, home dir, and other info is kept in LDAP.  Passwords
are kept in Kerberos.  To answer one concern that was expressed about
this, no, LDAP does not proxy password requests to Kerb.  The login
process hits Kerb directly for password authentication without going
through LDAP.

* We have a mirror server (dargo.trilug.org).  Because the size of the
disks used was small (9GB and 18GB), and all of the content therein is
just mirrored stuff from other sites, we made the decision to not use
RAID but to stripe the drives without any parity.  So we need to make
sure nothing unique & important gets put here.  It's got a basic OS on
it right now and is not actually serving anything yet.

Neither server is in the rack yet.  Both are in Tanners car.  We're
hoping to have moya hooked up early this week.  Dargo is a big brute of
a server and will take some more time, so he may come online later.

Other TriLUG servers will need to be modified to use moya.  Also we need
to migrate member data from MySQL, /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow on
fatalpha to Kerb/LDAP on Moya.  Admin scripts for the SC to
add/remove/modify members needs to be adjusted to use LDAP & Kerb
instead of MySQL, /etc/passwd & /etc/shadow.  Fatalpha needs to nfs
export user home dirs.

Mail server is not coming soon.  We have a dead 60GB drive which may
take some time to get replaced.  It sounds like we might need to
regroup, figure out what hardware we have, what it is currently doing,
and whether or not any of it can be leveraged for mail server purposes. 
Right now if anyone had LARGE scsi hard disks to donate, I'm confident
we could use one of the existing systems as a mail server.

For the ftp mirror server, we need to either bring in or develop
expertise in Logical Volume Management.  We've got a few drives (two
logical drives via RAID 0, one physical drive) that we'd like to apply
LVM to and then start the mirroring scripts.

Getting the RAID controllers going took awhile because #1 they did not
come with any disks and #2 the server had a bum floppy controller.  We
had to (*ick*) boot from a Win98 CD and then pop in a CD-R which had the
Mylex tools on it at which point we were good to go.

We have one piece of unused server hardware, not sure where it will fit
in.  It is a Dell PowerEdge 2200 with dual Pentium II 333 processors,
128MB of RAM, dual 4GB scsi hard disks, SCSI CDROM, dual fast ethernet
cards.  I suppose we could just get the OS going on the internal drives
and NFS mount everything else.