Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Configuring a System
Using Distributed Systems Administration Utilities
Chapter 3 145
Using Distributed Systems Administration
Utilities
You can use Distributed Systems Administration Utilities (DSAU) tools
to send files and commands to designated systems in your cluster or
network. The DSAU tools provide the following:
• Configuration synchronization
• Consolidated logging
• Command fanout
With configuration synchronization, you can have confidence that
systems in your cluster or network are maintained to a standard you
adopt. As you make changes on your configuration master, those changes
are propagated to all your client systems.
With consolidated logging, you can examine a single log that contains
entries from all systems in your configuration, in order of their time
stamps, so you can find a specific entry easily.
With command fanout, you can send the same command from one
designated system to all the systems in your defined configuration. This
eliminates visiting all systems in the configuration and many manual
operations.
Introduction to Configuration Synchronization
Managing the configuration and configuration drift of a set of distributed
systems is a constant challenge for system administrators. There are a
variety of tools available to help manage various aspects of multi-system
configuration management. For example, for account management,
standard solutions include the Network Information System (NIS) and
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). For file level
synchronization, tools like rdist ( see the rdist (1) manpage) and rsync
are available. HP’s System Insight Manager helps to discover, monitor
and manage groups of systems.