Testbed Update Plan

Planning the update of the middleware/development test bed

There is a number of tasks involved in bringing the testbed to where we like to be. We also need to agree on a timeframe in which we like to see these things accomplished.

inventory of current services

This section should list the current services we run and use on the testbeds. For each service, we should explain what we should like to do with it (keep, drop, change?).

Data plan for precious data

Precious means anything that took effort to put together, but nothing that lives in version control elsewhere. Think home directories, system configurations, pre-generated ssh host keys, X509 host certs, etc.

One idea is to put all of this on a box that is not involved in regular experimentation and messing about, and have backup arranged from this box to beerput. After this is arranged we begin to migrate precious data from all the other machines here, leaving the boxen in a state that we don't get sweaty palms over scratching and reinstalling them.

Hardware inventory

Perhaps this should be done first. Knowing what hardware we have is prerequisite to making sensible choices about what we try to run where.

Network plan

All of the machines should be put in the P4CTB VLAN (vlan 2), which is covered by ACLs to prevent public access. This is a first line in defence against intrusions. In some cases we may like to run virtual machines in the open/experimental network (vlan 8); for that the trick is to create a second bridge with a tagged ethernet device in vlan 8: see /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.8

VLAN=yes
DEVICE=eth0.8
BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
IPV6INIT=no
IPV4INIT=no

Then: ifup eth0.8 and

brctl addbr broe
brctl addif broe eth0.8

Unfortunately, the IPV6INIT=no doesn't help, it gets an IPv6 address anyway. This bridge can then be used to add virtual network devices for machines that live in open/experimental.

LDAP migration

We're going to ditch our own directory service (it served us well, may it rest in peace) in favour of the central Nikhef service. This means changing user ids in some (all?) cases which should be done preferable in a single swell foop.