I can’t stand it when people release open source software, expect people to use it, and don’t provide any sort of documentation. I’m not the sort of person who enjoys writing doco, but I do think it’s required.

So here, in it’s entirety: the Rollout Manual

Rollout

Introduction

Rollout is a system developed to manage UNIX servers. It is primarily
focused towards Linux, but could be adapted to Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.

It is written purely in Perl, and the configuration is also a Perl source
file. Some Perl knowledge is required to edit the configuration, but
copy-and-paste will probably suffice.

Overview

System Administration can generally be reduced to a set of steps, which must
be completed in order. Some example steps include:

• Copy files, create symlinks
• Edit configuration files
• Start / stop services
• Add / modify users & groups
• Install applications

The idea behind Rollout is to automate all these steps in a configurable
way. Rollout is by design indempotent - it can be run many times on a single
server and produce the same results.

Running Rollout

Rollout is self-installing on servers. The following command line will
install rollout for the first time:

URL=http://rollout.localdomain; wget -O- $URL/rollout | perl - -s -u $URL

After it’s installed, it can be run just by calling rollout.
You must however give a comment on the rollout command line. This should be a
short reason for running Rollout.

The first run uses the -s flag, which runs rollout in safe
mode. In this mode, all the steps are run but no changes are
actually made. This is used to check that nothing bad will happen when it’s run
for real.

After the safe mode run has been checked, it can be run again without the
-s flag, and all steps will be applied.

NOTE: The first run requires the Net::HTTP perl module
to already be installed. This is part of the libwww-perl package
in Debian based distributions.

Command-line Arguments

The following command line arguments are available:

Logging

Every Rollout run that is run without the -s flag will be
logged by the 99-complete step. The default is to make a HTTP request to the
rollout server and pass it the log. The sample complete.php script
will receive the log and do nothing with it.

Configuration

The entire configuration for Rollout is stored in rollout.cfg.
This file is a Perl source file, so it can be checked for correctness by
running perl -c rollout.cfg.

A major design concept in the rollout configuration is inheritance.
Since many devices will have similar configurations, they should inherit as
much as possible using the ISA configuration item. Each class in
the ISA section is also specified in the same config, and they can
inherit from other classes. It’s even possible to have a device directly
inherit another device’s configuration, but this would include everything, even
network interfaces.

The only thing that needs to be changed in the file is the %m
hash, which contains configuration for everything. A sample device
configuration looks like this:

kickstart => {
  ISA => { RHEL4_i386 => 1, Web_Server => 1 }, # Inherit the RHEL4_i386 and Web_Server classes
  interfaces => {
    eth0 => {
      dhcp => 'kickstart',                     # eth0 gets its IP by DHCP
      mac => '00:50:8B:E8:A0:6D',
      primary => 1,
    },
    eth1 => {
      ip => '10.0.0.1',                        # eth1 is statically defined on its own network
      netmask => '255.255.255.0',
      mac => '00:D0:B7:E3:5A:F4',
    },
  },
  nfs_share => {
    "/kickstart" => {                          # Share the /kickstart directory by NFS
      "10.0.0.0/24" => "ro,no_root_squash",    # Allow the private LAN to access the nfs share
    },
  },
  firewall_allow => [;
    '# Rollout HTTP', # This comment is inserted directly into the rules list
    any => '8140',    # Allow any host to connect to tcp port 8140
    admin => '80',    # Allow the admin network to connect to tcp port 80
  ],
  packages => [;
    'dhcp',           # Make sure the dhcp and rpm-devel packages are installed
    'rpm-devel',
  ],
},

Configuration Items

The following items are available for use in rollout.cfg:

Sample Run

The following is pasted directly from the terminal after running Rollout on freemantle:

01-setup
02-network
  Installing /etc/network/interfaces from text
  Modified /etc/resolv.conf by appending options timeout:5 attempts:2
  Network config is considered dangerous, changes won't be applied unless you specify the "-f network" argument.
03-hosts
  Modified /etc/hosts by appending 172.16.40.54 mulberry
  Modified /etc/hosts by appending 172.16.40.184 kickstart
05-users
06-ssh_keys
  Installing /root/.ssh/authorized_keys from text
  Changing mode of /root/.ssh/authorized_keys to 644
15-packages
  Installing packages lshw
16-gpg
20-sysctl
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 1
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 0
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1
  Modified /etc/sysctl.conf by appending net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0
21-cvs
24-dir_check
24-file_extract
25-file_install
  Installing /etc/pam_ldap.conf from http://rollout.domain/conf/pam_ldap.conf
  Installing /etc/libnss-ldap.conf from http://rollout.domain/conf/libnss-ldap.conf
  Changing mode of /etc/libnss-ldap.conf to 600
  Installing /etc/ntp.conf from http://rollout.domain/conf/ntp.conf
  Installing /etc/resolv.conf from http://rollout.domain/conf/resolv.conf
  Changing target of symlink /usr/local/bin/vis to /usr/local/bin/viw
27-port_check
70-nfs
80-file_append
80-file_modify
  Modified /etc/nsswitch.conf with s/^passwd:.*/passwd:  compat ldap/, s/^group:.*/group:  compat ldap/
80-file_uncomment
85-cron
90-services
99-complete

Steps