Rebuilding the Servers

OK, lets say you've burned down the School of IT and you need to get Vislab back up and running from scratch. This Howto aims to give a brief outline of the steps to do this for the core servers.

Bringing up Hail

Hail is the central server at vislab, dealing with most of the user and machine-centric network tasks. It is a Debian Sarge machine. Assuming you've bought a robust machine with plenty of disk space to host it:

/dev/sda2 957M 153M 805M 16% / /dev/sda5 3.8G 923M 2.9G 25% /usr /dev/sda6 3.8G 33M 3.7G 1% /usr/local/dev/sda7 3.8G 1.3G 2.5G 34% /var /dev/sda8 957M 39M 919M 4% /tmp /dev/sda9 3.8G 2.0G 1.8G 53% /mnt/scratch /dev/sda10 119G 95G 25G 80% /home}}}

  • The current IP address is 129.78.157.20
  • Setup network logins:
    • Install nis and nfs-kernel-server
      • Nis config is done during installation. You mainly need to know that the Vislab NIS domain is 'vislab2.vislab.usyd.edu.au'
      • You need to export the appropriate directories on the NFS server. This is done through /etc/exports. There current one is here: attachment:exports
  • Install the applications. All of these are available in the standard Debian repository and can be installed with apt-get:
    • Postfix mail server
      • The current configuration: attachment:postfix-conf-20060828.tar.gz
    • Courier SSL IMAP server:
      • Currrent config: attachment:courier-conf-20060828.tar.gz
    • DNS server
      • This is currently 'tinydns', which is not in Debian for licensing reasons. However you could use any other DNS server. Regardless, the current config is here: tinydns-root-20060828.txt

    • DHCP server. Current config: dhcpd.conf

    • Jabber server. Currently we're using Jabberd2, but that's rapidly being abandoned by most sites, including jabber.org. Ejabberd is looking like the best of breed at the moment.
    • Optionally install Apache2 or some other web-server. This is only to allow access to user homepages under ~/public_html

Bringing up Venues

Venues is the main project web server for Vislab.

  • Install Debian
  • Install Apache2, mod_php and mod_python
  • Install and configure MySql

  • Install dnsmasq for DNS caching
  • Install and configure NIS and NFS. See ["Installing Debian"] for details.

Setting up blogs and wiki

In practice the simplest way to recover the various sites is to recover the contents of /var/www from the backup system (see BackupNotes), but I'll go through the theoretical rebuild ...

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Masahiro Takatsuka,
14 Mar 2012, 21:40
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exports
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Masahiro Takatsuka,
14 Mar 2012, 21:40
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main.cf
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Masahiro Takatsuka,
14 Mar 2012, 21:40
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postfix-conf-20060828.tar.gz
(92k)
Masahiro Takatsuka,
14 Mar 2012, 21:40
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Masahiro Takatsuka,
14 Mar 2012, 21:40
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venues-apache-conf-20060828.tar.gz
(23k)
Masahiro Takatsuka,
14 Mar 2012, 21:40
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