[NCUC E-team] Linux admin stuff

[Tapani Tarvainen]

To complete the series, a few words about Linux system administration.

Once the system is up and running there is not much that
needs to be done regularly.

At the very least, however, someone should read root's email and
react to problems. It is redirected simply by /root/.forward
and now comes to me - I want someone to take this over ASAP.
(Bill, sorry, but if nobody volunteers I'll direct it to you
and let you find someone else to take over at your leisure.)

Splitting this among several people would also be possible
(as long as they don't both assume the other(s) will take care
of everything...)

In particular disk space is likely to run out sometime soon(ish).
Also, RAM is fairly low and some services (especially etherpad)
tend to die when they run out of memory (and need to be restarted).

System software updates don't need much attention, security
patches are installed automatically, other updates can be
installed easily enough (apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade)
but generally aren't urgent (a couple of times a year is enough).

Wordpress needs to be upgraded separately, as it has been
manually installed (system-supplied version being too old)
and fairly heavily customized. Skipping a version or two
is generally no big deal, but running old version for years
would probably not be a good idea.

Upgrading the operating system (Ubuntu LTS) to new release
should be done every two years on the average, but it is
generally not urgent (old versions are supported several years
anyway). The process is nowadays usually very easy, especially
on servers, but of course it's recommended to start by checking
that backups are up to date (including databases).

Backups are now taken to two locations, in the 2nd disk
at Gandi and in my personal backup server. I may leave
the latter running for the time being, as it costs me
basically nothing, and it's only for real emergencies
(including a failure of the Gandi backup).
The only care and feeding the former generally needs is making
sure it doesn't run out of disk space, and it will start sending
emails to root when that happens (easiest solution is
purchasing more disk space from Gandi, although some could
be saved by reducing backup frequency).
Backups are done with rsnapshot and can be restored
by simply copying from /backup/...

Finally, a reminder: there's a list of things
that could and perhaps should be done at
http://pad.ncuc.org/p/website-todo
- not exactly a neat presentation, rather a random
collection of ideas, but perhaps still useful.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen