There's always been a fine line between a good sysadmin and a programmer. Capistrano is software built for Ruby on Rails to make deploys across multiple servers easy, however, the potential is much greater than just code deployment. I have recently grown in love with how easily I can run commands across groups of servers, and setting up Capistrano is not a difficult task. If you've ever configured password-less SSH access, you can get this up and running without much difficulty.

I haven't had much time to continue work on FreePanel, but the Perl modules I've written have proven to be useful in cluster management. Take a look at the following diagram as an example scenario:

There's two key points to take away from that diagram.

• physical servers are load balanced using a single VIP (Virtual IP)
• the servers share access to a single storage mount

So I've been working on a setup for virtualization, where currently I'm using one large iSCSI target from an OpenSolaris machine. It occurred to me that there is a downside to this. I cannot use zfs snapshots for individual machines and backups/restores will be more difficult. I also did not want to be hassled with having to connect the iscsi targets using iscsiadm every time I spin up a new VM.

People are lazy when it comes to regularly backing up their data. This is a project of mine that I use on a daily basis. It's a fairly simple to setup backup server that uses rsync over SSH to backup anything you give it. Best part about it is that it is cross platform compatible and can be scripted to backup multiple PCs at once. This is an very flexible way of creating a backup system and best of all is entirely open source and free.

Take a look at some simple quick scripts to make network administration much easier. Here you'll find the following:

• Backup Files for Workstation Rebuild/Migration
• Add a list of users to Active Directory from a text file

This was the first real VBScript I used on the job. I wrote this while I held an intern position at an IT outsourcing company called Innovative Network Design (IND) Corporation in Parsippany, NJ. The reason I wrote it is simple, they kept assigning me to collect specific information from various client servers. So why keep doing it manually? I wrote this code and the employees actually still use it.

Using VBScript and netcat it is quite simple to create a basic backdoor into a users system with the priviledges of the user that ran the script. It's a very basic concept and all it does it download the netcat program (nc.exe) from a trusted website into the users c:\windows\system32 folder. What this does is allow you to run netcat from the command line without dealing with the full location of nc.exe. Once the file is in the system32 folder it can simple be run from any command prompt.