dparrish.com

There’s been enough actual interest in Rollout for me to move it to a community site. I chose Google Code because I work there, and it’s much faster than Sourceforge.

The new URL for Rollout is: http://code.google.com/p/rollout.

Unfortunately they don’t support git, so I have to deal once again with Subversion.

The new checkout instructions are:
svn checkout http://rollout.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rollout

The manual is online there, and an issue tracker, so submit bugs!

I’ve decided that after 8 months of using Rollout on a daily basis, I should publish a “stable” 1.0 release.

You can get the 1.0 stable release at http://dparrish.com/files/rollout-1.0.tar.gz.

Although this is stable and shouldn’t destroy any of your systems, it does still (and will always) require configuration before it will work for you.

As always, the latest version is available by git:

git clone http://git.dparrish.com/rollout

Comments / bug reports / flames are more than welcome.

Tags: rollout

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
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Announcing a new Open-Source project: Rollout!

Rollout is a system developed to automate system administration on 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 may suffice.

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 idempotent - it can be run many times on a single server and produce the same results.

There is a certain amount of overlap between this and other projects such as puppet and cfengine. They all have similar goals. Rollout is designed to be very easy to extend (as long as you can cope with Perl) and very fast.

You can get rollout from my git repository at http://git.dparrish.com/rollout. If you’re using Cogito, you can run:

cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/rollout

This is the first public release, and as such is not expected to be everything to everybody. However it is in active production use and hasn’t destroyed anything yet. Use it at your own risk. The documentation included contains instructions on setting up a server and configuring clients.

Also, I’m enabling comments on this post (and I feel dirty doing it) so that people can submit bugs/patches/requests/complaints.

If you’re one of the lucky few using dbackup, and want to upgrade from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1 so things work (I really shouldn’t use a minor version number increase to fix such a major bug), you’ll probably want to run the following command in your backup storage root:

rename 's/^([a-z./]+).(d+).(d+).(d+-d+-d+-d+-d+-d+).(meta|data)$/
      sprintf("%s.%03d.%03d.%s.%s", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5)/ex' */*

This should be run as all one line. It requires the rename perl script, which is in the perl package on Debian/Ubuntu at least. If you don’t have it, grab it here.

I’ve released a new version of dbackup today, version 1.1.1. This version fixes a sorting problem, which you would see if you ever get above level 10 in a backup run.

You can download the new version at:

Along with this release, I’m also opening up my git repository, so you can grab the latest source yourself. If you’re using Cogito, which I highly recommend, you can run:

cg clone http://git.dparrish.com/dbackup

For instructions on using dbackup, see my original post.

dbackup is a disk-based client-server backup system for Linux or other UNIX systems.

It works on the principal that disks are cheaper and more reliable than tapes.

Backups are started by cron probably on a daily basis by the client. The client backs up individual filesystems / directories with tar and sends the result to the server, which stores them in a simple tree-based directory structure.

Restores are trivial, either by using the supplied restore client, or by simply copying the appropriate tar files off the server and uncompressing them.

Features

• Backup very large filesystems as long as you have the disk space
• Works with very large numbers of servers / filesystems
• No state is kept on the client, it’s all on the server
• Backup to multiple backup servers in round-robin
• Configuration can be global or per-server
• Authentication for client restores (optional)
• Supports optional gzip or bzip2 compression
• Supports client-side gpg encryption
• Trivial procedure for restores
• Daily / Full incremental backups

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libcli is a C shared library which you can use to easily add a Cisco™-like command line interface to any application. It’s designed to be used over telnet, but will work just as well without it.

The library supports command-line editing, history, authentication and callbacks for a user-definable function tree.

You can download the latest version on the Sourceforge project page.

The API is fully documented. You can find both a developer’s and a user’s reference both in the tarball and on this site.

libcli is available under the LGPL license version 2.1.

This guide should show you everything you need to embed libcli into your program.

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This guide shows a user how to use a libcli-based application. This will be
familiar to anyone who has used a Cisco device before.

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