Issues in Unix Infrastructure Design

Issues in unix infrastructure design

Lee Damon

Abstract

Who should attend: Anyone who is designing, implementing, or maintaining a UNIX environment with 2 to 20,000+ hosts. System administrators, architects, and managers who need to maintain multiple hosts with few admins.

This intermediate class will examine many of the background issues that need to be considered during the design and implementation of a mixed-architecture or single-architecture UNIX environment. It will cover issues from authentication (single sign-on) to the Holy Grail of single system images.

This class won't implement a "perfect solution," as each site has different needs. It will try to raise all the questions you should ask (and answer) while designing the solution that will meet your needs. We will look at some freeware and some commercial solutions, as well as many of the tools that exist to make a workable environment possible.

Topics include -

• Administrative domains: Who is responsible for what, and what can users do for themselves?
• Desktop services vs. farming: Do you do serious computation on the desktop, or do you build a compute farm?
• Disk layout: How do you plan for an upgrade? Where do things go?
• Free vs. purchased solutions: Should you write your own, or hire a consultant or company?
• Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous: Homogeneous is easier, but will it do what your users need?
• The essential master database: How can you keep track of what you have?
• Policies to make life easier
• Push vs. pull
• Getting the user back online in 5 minutes
• Remote administration: Lights-out operation; remote user sites; keeping up with vendor patches, etc.
• Scaling and sizing: How do you plan on scaling?
• Security vs. sharing: Your users want access to everything. So do the crackers . . .
• Single sign-on: How can you do it securely?
• Single system images: Can users see just one environment, no matter how many OSes there are?
• Tools: The free, the purchased, the homegrown

Presenter Biography

Lee Damon has a B.S. in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE (US) & LOPSA since treir inceptions. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of LISA '04.

Who should attend

Anyone who is designing, implementing, or maintaining a UNIX environment with 2 to 20,000+ hosts. System administrators, architects, and managers who need to maintain multiple hosts with few admins.