[H-SASIG] Proposed changes to Excalibur

[Russell Stuart]

On Thu, 2009-12-03 at 01:14 -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
> We could buy an additional IP on the Linode for $1/month and bind the 
> humbug sshd to the 2nd interface, thus allowing continued use of tcp/22. 
> Not being able to ssh to excalibur directly from the meeting room sounds 
> problematic.

My current plan is to follow Mark's suggestion to put it on both 24 and
563.  I suspect port 563 will work.

Turns out all of us SysAdmin's that turn up to meetings have external
servers we go through first.  Each of us has a different reason I think.
In any case, it means the port isn't an issue.

> With respect to the work already carried out, the chroot seems like an 
> inelegent solution to me, requiring hacked startup scripts, etc.

Apart from the sshd port change, none of the files installed by Debian
are changed, so I am not sure you could say the startup scripts are
hacked.

All that happens is the VM's inittab isn't used (obviously), so the
existing init scripts are run via a different mechanism.  I happen to
think the way it works is rather elegant - but each to their own.

>   This 
> sort of things costs resources (time) and isn't easy to maintain in the 
> long term.  I know this is only meant to be a temporary solution but how 
> many of those last years?

You say this will be complicated and hard to support, so perhaps some
comparisons are required.  Here are some line counts for non-standard
stuff we have on excalibur:

The shell scripts that do the chroot startup .....   87 lines.
Firewall .........................................  322 lines.
Backup system .................................... 2500 lines.

> Linux Australia was apparently in a position to provide a virtual system 
> to LUGs.   Did anyone approach them?

No.

> Russell you suggested some cheaper providers on IRC one day.  Perhaps one 
> of them would be a good option.

They were all container based, which is why they were so cheap.  When I
mentioned that at club meetings everybody recoiled in horror, so I gave
up on the idea.