HP-UX 11i Version 2 December 2005 Release Notes

General System Administration
Distributed Systems Administration Utilities
Chapter 5
97
Distributed Systems Administration Utilities
Distributed Systems Administration Utilities (DSAU) is a new set of utilities for HP-UX
11i v2. DSAU provides the following capabilities:
• Configuration synchronization tools - provides policy-based configuration
management for groups of systems and Serviceguard clusters.
• Consolidated logging tools - provides centralized logging and advanced log filtering
features. Provides specific support for creating a highly available log consolidation
server using HP Serviceguard.
1
• Command fanout tool - provides high performance tools for executed shell commands
and distributing files across groups of systems and Serviceguard clusters.
Summary of Change
DSAU is new with the December 2005 release of HP-UX. It is available on all Operating
Environments, except the Technical Computing Operating Environment.
The Distributed Systems Administration Utilities provide a variety of tools for
simplifying the management of groups of systems and Serviceguard clusters.
There are three utilities:
• Configuration Synchronization - based on the open source tool cfegnine, or
“configuration engine,” the administrator can centrally define management actions
to be applied to a set of managed systems. cfengine is a client/server based tool. The
central “configuration master” system hosts the configuration description file which
defines the management actions to be performed on each managed client. The
configuration master also hosts the “golden image” files — master copies of files that
are distributed to the clients. The administrator can use cfengine to perform tasks
such as the following:
— ensure that client systems are using a correct set of configuration files
— disable inappropriately configured files on the client
— check file permissions, ownership, and track checksum changes
— perform edits to files
— execute arbitrary shell commands on each client
— check for processes, signal processes
A Configuration Synchronization Wizard is available to help the administrator
quickly configure cfegnine for managing a set of distributed systems or configuring it
as a highly available service in a Serviceguard cluster. For more information see the
cfegnine (8) and cscync_wizard (1M) manpages.
• Consolidated Logging - standard UNIX syslogd offers UDP-based log forwarding to
a central log consolidator today. The DSAU tools provide the open source tool “syslog
next-generation” or syslog-ng. The syslog-ng tool offers additional features that
make it a powerful tool for log forwarding and log centralization and consolidation.
1. See “HP Serviceguard” on page 114.