local usefull databases

By default, linux and unix systems have two usefull databases installed. Those databases may speed up your work as a system administrator.

First of all, there is the locate database. This database contains the list of the files in your system. Imagine you need to edit a file whose name is "password" but you can't remember its path. A quick way to do it would be :

luangsay@ramiro:/tmp$ locate -r password$
/etc/pam.d/common-password
/home/luangsay/personnel/password
/mnt/chroot/usr/share/doc/cdialog-0.9b/samples/password
/usr/share/doc/dialog/examples/password
/usr/share/pam/common-password
/var/lib/pam/password

(-r switch is for using regular expressions).
To initialize the database or update it, you can use the command updatedb. Normally, your operating system does it with a cron task.

The second database is apropos, a french word which means "about". This is a collection of the first description sentences (the whatis sentence) of all the man pages. To know all the manpages that deal with the configuration of passwords, you would type :

luangsay@ramiro:/tmp$ apropos -s 5 password
login.defs (5) - configuration de la suite des mots de passe cachés shadow password
passwd (5) - the password file
shadow (5) - encrypted password file
smbpasswd (5) - The Samba encrypted password file

Here, to create/update the database, you will use makewhatis (or mandb in Debian).

Another interesting database that is less known is perlindex. Quite usefull because perl is (still...) used by many system admins. This tool indexes all your perl modules documentation pages. So, to find all the modules installed on your system that deal with LDAP, you can type:

luangsay@ramiro:/tmp$ perlindex ldap
1 1.791 share/perl5/URI/ldap.pm
2 0.317 share/perl5/URI.pm
3 0.137 share/perl/5.10.0/pod/perlhpux.pod

Highest mark (1.791) gives you the most relevant page. If you pulse 1, you'll get the perldoc page printed. Of course, such database isn't as big as the CPAN one, but it proved to have helped me quite a few times in the past.

Finally, I would like to say a word about maybe my prefered database. I mean, the debian packages database. Debian apt-get system is a lot more faster than redhat yum software and it offers you many more packages. I believe every debian admin knows the power of the "apt-cache search/show" commands so I won't waste my time giving an example. For those who don't have a debian based distribution, you can get an idea of this database on this web page. If you have to install a new solution on your servers, and you don't know what software can handle it, the debian package can give you a precious help to get the information. Even if you don't have debian, it can be very usefull.

rcs

The first thing I was taught on my first day as a system administrator was to always do a backup of the files I wanted to modify. The way I was told was this one :

cp foo foo.20091202

(the extension is year - month - day)

This proved to be a poor way to backup files and it has a lot of drawbacks. Now, I usually use RCS to do this job. It gives you most of the advantages of a revision control system like CVS or subversion but without the burden to install lot of binaries, libraries and create global repositories (of course, with rcs you don't have the concurrent access feature nor authentication stuff but we don't really care about that just to backup some configuration files).

In Debian, you can install it like this :

apt-get install rcs

If you have Redhat, it would be :

yum install rcs

Then, to backup a file in the current directory :

mkdir RCS
ci -l foo

("-l" option is for the lock feature of rcs, something that does not seem very usefull to my view).

After some changes in the file, you can see them with rcsdiff :

rcsdiff foo

To save a new version of the file :

ci -l foo

If you want to list all the versions of your file :

rlog foo

To check the differences between version 3 and version 5 :

rcsdiff -r3 -r5 foo

And finally, if you want to get version 4 back :

co -r4 foo

One thing I do appreciate by using rcs to modify every configuration file, is that it is very easy to know all the changes you've made on your server (for instance, if you have to migrate the server to a new OS it may be helpfull) by typing :

locate RCS

Of course, this will never sustitute a real remote backup policy (with TSM or Netbackup for instance) of your server. But it is much more flexible to know what was changed in a file with RCS than looking your modified versions on the tapes...

Keep in mind that RCS is for local changes. If you want to do the same modification on a file on all your servers, maybe you should pass to a CVS/subversion system, or use a different method to centralize your changes.

clusterssh

Many times you have to perform the same task on many servers. Clusterssh enables you to send the commands just once and get things done in each of those servers.

In Debian, you can install it this way :

apt-get install clusterssh

(for windows, you can get a similar software from this link).
Then, for instance, to connect to server1, server2 and server3, just do:

cssh -l root server1 server2 server3 &

It will open 3 xterm windows, one for each server. You will get too a little console to type your command. If you just write some text in this console, it will be written on all the other windows.

Here is an photo of cssh connecting to 2 servers. The little console to type commands is on the right :

With this tool, I have been able to manage as far as 12 servers at the same time. The only limit of the number of server you can manage is the size of your screen.

What I do like with clusterssh, is that you don't need to set ssh-keys on your server like with pssh. What is more, it is easy to make a change on just one server by focusing on that server window instead of the little command console.

The only drawback is that if you make a mistake, you make it on all servers (with great power comes great responsibility...). Despite of that, I believe it is a great tool to increase productivity.