this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Almost the same here. Well,
du -shc *|sort -hrI admin around three hundred linux servers and this is one of my most common tasks - although I use -shc as I like the total too, and don't bother with less as it's only the biggest files and dirs that I'm interested in and they show up last, so no need to scrollback.
When managing a lot of servers, the storage requirements when installing extra software is never trivial. (Although our storage does do very clever compression and it might recognise the duplication of the file even across many vm filesystems, I'm never quite sure that works as advertised on small files)
What do you use for management? Ansible? Puppet? Chef? Something else entirely?
Main tool is Uyuni, but we use Ansible and AWX for building new vms, and adhoc ansible for some changes.
Interesting; I hadn't heard of Uyuni before. Thanks for the info!
Seems it just runs Salt/Saltstack?
Suse forked Redhat's Spacewalk just before it turned into Foreman + Katello.
Then worked an absolute crapload on it to turn it into a modern orchestrator. Part of that was to adopt salt as the agent interface, gradually getting rid of the creaking EL traditional client.
To say "it just runs salt" is to rather miss all the other stuff Uyuni does. Full repo and patch management, remote control, config management, builds, ansible playbook support, salt support, and just about everything else you need to manage hundreds of machines. Oh, and it does that for Rocky, RHEL, Alma, Suse, Ubuntu, Debian and probably a bunch more too, by now. Has a very rich webui, a full API and you can do a bunch more from the cli as well. And if your estate gets too big to manage with one machine, there are proxy agents, as many as you want. I only run a couple of hundred vms through it, but there are estates running thousands.
And it's free and foss.
Honestly, it's pretty awesome and I'm amazed it's not more widely known.
Oh that's pretty nifty, thanks for the comment. Sorry wasn't trying to minimize the tool, I was simply referring to the orchestration/config management aspect of it when I looked it up real quick.
I used to be responsible for configurations of 40,000 (yes forty thousand) VMs for a large company using puppet and then later using Ansible and that was an interesting challenge. I've been out of the configuration management game for a few years now though so I'm pretty out of the loop. Was familiar with spacewalk back in the day too.
I'll have to check Uyuni out, thanks for sharing!
We'd use
du -xh --max-depth=1|sort -hrInteresting. Do you often deal with dirs on different filesystems?
Yeah, I was a Linux System Admin/Engineering for MLB/Disney+ for 5 years. When I was an admin, one of our tasks was clearing out filled filesystems on hosts that alerted.
Sounds pretty similar to what I do now - but never needed the -x. Guess that might be quicker when you're nested somewhere there is a bunch of nfs/smb stuff mounted in.
We'd do it from root (/) and drill down from there, it was usually /var/lib or /var/logs that was filling up, but occasionally someone would upload a 4.5 GB file to their home folder which has a quota of 5 GB.
Using ncdu would have been the best way, but that would require it being installed on about 7 thousand machines.