RE: [SAGE] Respondents needed for article on sysadmin survival

["Dustin Puryear" <dpuryear@usa.net>]

> infrastructure out of it. I've been tempted for some time to use some of
> my copious spare time to create a paper describing an idealized
> environment modeled on the paper but tied to specific applications
> running in a homogenous FreeBSD environment. The idea is that it would
> be become more "concrete" for folks that haven't been already been
> thinking about this topic.

I would be interested in such a discussion. I am currently working to use
jails under FreeBSD to move my services at one client from being based on
machines to just "running" on a machine. My goal is that any system that I
need can be built using a set of scripts. (Nothing new to this crowd.) For
example, currently I can build a complete mail system in a jail with spam
filtering and AV on a host server using:

# mount buildsys:/dsk/buildsys /buildsys
# /buildsys/builds/mail/install.sh
# umount /buildsys

I then just run the jail.

If I need to later move that mail system to another server I can either
rebuild the mail system using mail/install.sh or, better yet, just do:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/stopjails.sh
# scp -rp /my/jails/mail.example.com newsvr:/my/jails/mail.example.com
# ssh newsvr /usr/local/etc/rc.d/startjails.sh

This description is very simplified, but that's the general idea, and it
works. With a combination of this and NFS I'm pretty much set.

My technique is in no way original. I would like to see how others do it.