About BastionLinux
Our BastionLinux distro has been around since 2003. We've been particularly focused on packaging Python, Zope, and Plone for all of this time. As far as we know, we're the only Plone RPM packager. We focus upon RHEL simply because this is the only distro which has a proven sales record in the marketplace and if you purchase RHEL, you might indeed see the value in a maintained Plone.
Running
System adminstration with BastionLinux
What is it?
BastionLinux is a standard Linux distro based upon Red Hat. We use RPM, yum, and up2date to install Chef software, packaged by us, from our own repository. All you've really got to do is to ensure your BastionLinux user/password credentials are in your /etc/yum.repos.d/bastion.repo file. See http://linux.last-bastion.net/LBN/rpmmanager_download for more details.
Whats special?
Well nothing. We're all about following industry standards and not having any particular learning curve for BastionLinux. We do include two tools that we consider are indispensible: (i) monit; and (ii) chef-client.
Monit is a system that manages services, their dependencies, and watchdogging them should they stop responding. With a few simple commands, you can see what should be running, whether or not it is, and can start/stop groups of services in a single command.
# what's running ...
$ monit summary
# restart my chef and all ...
$ monit -g chef restart
Our Chef infrastructure takes control of the configuration management for your entire Chef installation. We have it set up to run regularly as a daemon for you already. All you need to do to institute configuration changes (including very major configuration changes) is to change some of the roles/overrides for your server within our Chef and either wait til the daemon runs, or invoke this yourself:
$ chef-client
What do I have to do?
You can do whatever you like in managing your BastionLinux server. If you are trying to configure some component that we're managing with Chef, you'll be overwritten. If you lock us out, we're locked out. If you wish to use anything else within the BastionLinux stack, simply install it with yum.
We very much think that we bring best-of-breed solutions, packaging, and configuration to BastionLinux/Chef. We welcome discussion around this. If you've innovative ideas or configuration tweaks, we're definitely going to incorporate them if they have merit. If you'd like to go your own way in configuring aspects of your system, we've facilities for you to opt-out of our configuration management of these.
