Open Source System Administration Study Group

This group will learn about system administration topics with hands-on collaborative learning on a homelab setup of four Dell servers. A description of this session's plan in down below.
We’ll deploy components like LDAP(authentication), Ansible (Infrastructure as Code), NextCloud (file storage), OpenStack (Cloud computing), OpenTofu (IaC Terraform fork), containerization and other open source software. We also intend to explore clustering, certainly high-availability and possibly compute clustering.

We've setup the hardware and installed the OS. The first few sessions are going to be devoted to setting up basic infrastructure, including setting up the hardware, installing an OS, setting up LDAP, getting everyone up to speed on SSH and documentation and code repository standards. After that people can work on what they like, but the components listed above are things that at least some of us will be working on.

Session 2

Today we're going to go over how to work with the servers in a controlled, documented manner. We'll go over user accounts, connecting to the servers using SSH, installing packages, the use of git to store configurations, and the use of the wiki to document changes.

After a brief intro, we'll do a exercise where everyone installs a package on a server and documents what they did.

We'll talk about projects people want to do. A list of project ideas, big and small, will be circulated.

Please bring a laptop if you can. We'll have a limited number of machines available you can use.