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.

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.

Feel free to come when what we’re doing interests you, although priority will be given to those who attend regularly.

Your host has been a Linux System Administrator for 15 years.

Signup on Meetup is mandatory

Session 1

This is the second of at least 4 or 5 essential infrastructure buildout sessions before we can actually host user-facing services. Last session we unboxed the servers and got them mounted in the rack and connected.

Today we install the OS on the servers. We’ll install, or at least go through the initial steps of an Linux install, using these methods:

• Interactive Install with the installer
• Non-interactive Install using an answer file
• Local block-level disk cloning
• Local file-level disk cloning
• Imaging from a file
• Over the network imaging

Some of this will cover basic Linux knowledge just from a server setup perspective. It will be hands-on as much as possible. It might be pretty dull for Linux veterans. Skip it if you like, but coming will put you first in line for future sessions.