4. System Administration Activities

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of administering the underlying Debian Linux operating system and packages using Ansible and playbooks produced and published by the DIMS project team. For the purposes of training, this chapter will use the published local deployment variables and playbook templates that will install Trident and related tools in Virtualbox Vagrant virtual machines on a base Ubuntu 14.04 development system. (This is the platform used by DIMS developers to do development and development testing on laptops or development servers.)

The basic steps covered in the sections below are:

• Cloning the necessary repositories.
• Creating SSH key pairs.
• Running Ansible playbooks to establish a control host.
• Creating required Virtualbox box files using Packer.
• Building Vagrants from Virtualbox box files.
• Running Ansible playbooks to change configuration or update packages.

At the end of these steps, you will have a running Trident instance in local virtual machines with which you can practice customizing Trident or upgrade/update component packages in an isolated deployment that will not impact your production deployment. Once you are comfortable with these tasks, you will be able to administer a production system with greater confidence and reliability.