Please give a brief introduction of yourself.

I’ve been working as a Linux sysadmin at Geodesic Ltd. for over two years now. I started off with fairly standard sysadmin work of handling basic web servers etc and gradually moved onto upgrading the infrastructure.

So far, I have experience with LDAP (389 DS and openldap), Virtualization (Xen, KVM, linux-vserver) High Availability (HA) Clustering (Red Hat cluster suit, heartbeat, pacemaker, DRBD) etc. My primary work at the moment is handling the company’s infrastructure for scalability and high availability and migrating it to make full use of LDAP – basically, ease the lives of us sysadmins and in the process of the developers too :)


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

Currently, none to be noteworthy. However, as of right now I have some scripts for pacemaker and xen that I’m looking at committing upstream, as well as some documentation.

This’ll be my first public talk about FOSS. I hope to do more of these and contribute to FOSS by sharing my knowledge.


What will your workshop be, exactly ?

Its basically a recollection of my work experience with the above mentioned technologies. When I started working on these things, I came across some challenges, requirements etc and I had to figure out a way to either solve the issues or to work around them. In the process I gained a lot of good knowledge
which I hope to share. It should be very useful for anyone looking to boost their infrastructure with low cost and yet completely reliable components.

I’ve also planned for a demo of some of the HA Virtualization work.


What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this talk? What do you expect ?

The idea is to share knowledge and experience – to let people who might be starting down a path similar to my own, know, what is possible. I’d like to share the methods and practises that I’ve found to be the most effective to leverage these powerful technologies.

At the end of the day, I just hope everyone leaves with some good knowledge. I also expect to gain some of my own by interacting with people who work in the same field as I.


What kind of networks do you deploy ?

Well I don’t, nowadays. I just gradually keep on adding components to and upgrading the networks that I planned out and started deploying some year and a half back. Right now I’m about to deploy a nice, highly available postfix based mail system with an LDAP backend.


What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people starting out as Linux system admin ?

  1. Stop studying for RHCE. Seriously. Just learn the practicalities by doing hands-on stuff. You can then pass RHCE without issues. But if you learn just to pass RHCE, you’ll cripple yourself as an admin for the rest of your life.
  2. . screen(1) is your friend. Never ssh to a server without it.
  3. Learn to configure your package managers – yum, apt whichever. I’m dead serious when I say this. Repository priorities matter – especially when mixing apt repositories.
  4. Learn the shell. Learn it inside out. #bash on freenode is the best IRC channel out there. Go and sit in there and just keep reading.
  5. Stop compiling. Learn to package.
  6. Read, read and read. Not howtoforge. Read man pages and reference documentation once you’re done with the basic HOWTOs.
  7. Latest and greatest isn’t always the best.


How do see LDAP evolving in next 5 years ?

I’m not sure I’m equipped to answer this one on a global scale. But, from my experience, when it comes to integrating your infrastructure into a single, standardised, scalable and secure backend, LDAP is the way to go. The word to highlight here is `standardised’. People would say that you could integrate things into an RDBMS as well, but hey, not every service out there would support it.

I guess it all depends on what your specific requirements are. I am currently planning a system that’ll use LDAP for the main data storage but needs an SQL database of its own as well. So, again, its all subjective for me.


Which are your favorite virtualization package(s) on Linux and why ?

I quite like xen and kvm. linux-vserver I put to good use as well. I’ve wanted to try out openvz, but never quite needed it. linux-vserver did the job for me. I was quite impressed with xen’s live migration capabilities. Haven’t yet tried that out with kvm yet.

But, I must say, I really enjoy the latest libvirtd. virsh is a powerful abstraction. I quite like it.


What advice will you give to system admins moving from other operating system(s) to Linux ?

Learn the shell. Learn the OS. Prepare to unlearn and re-learn if necessary, but first learn the guts of the OS.


Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?

In FOSS conferences, I’ve only ever visited the previous three foss.in
editions. That too wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for one Mr. Atul Chitnis. So, this’ll be my first gnunify. From what I’ve been told by the like of Pradeepto and Ameya Pandit, a previous speaker at gnunify, it’ll be quite fun. Am totally looking forward to it.