Linux Management

[MatthewL]

I have a bit of a home lab now running on a Promox host, a number of the servers are now Debian, I've only ever had a a few Linux servers so managed them individually, any hints and tips for managing multiple servers if at all any?  I am looking at webmin which makes things easier just wondered if anything worth looking at?

[Davit2005]

What sort of management are you looking at? Updates, purely cli stuff? Or web management.

 

I'm in the same boat, 3 node proxmox cluster, 3 docker VMs, and various other VMs running Zabbix, pi-hole, etc.

 

Was looking at Ansible but did not get very far. Ansible would suit me well as I have Aruba CX switches at home and MikroTik routers.

 

If anyone has some real basic pointers or links to good starter Ansible YouTube videos please let me know 🙂 

[MatthewL]

Just an overview of all the machines, wasn't sure what was out there, very rarely need to make changes but would be nice to centralise it if I can, only playing around so thought I'd ask.

[TheHyperTechie]

I have been a user of https://www.dwservice.net/en/home.html for a long time, and it does the trick. 

 

I have also been following https://patchmon.net/ for a while, although, it may be overkill for your needs.

Edited March 18 by TheHyperTechie

[DalekSec]

Zabbix? My go to monitoring tool

[NegativeKillDeath]

I don't know how many servers you have but take a look at Ubuntu Landscape, a free licence can manage up to 5 servers. 

[pete]

For configuration state, I'd look at Ansible (or Landscape, as mentioned above).

 

Edit: and the free tier of Ansible Tower (the GUI bit) seems to no longer be a thing.  Check out Semaphore instead if you want a UI: https://semaphoreui.com/

[dhicks]

14 hours ago, MatthewL said:

a number of the servers are now Debian, I've only ever had a a few Linux servers so managed them individually, any hints and tips for managing multiple servers if at all any?

 

I've found Debian's auto-update facility to be reliable and easy to set up, if you haven't got that set up already. It doesn't really answer your question, but at least you don't have to worry if your servers are up-to-date, which is one less thing.

[jthompson]

20 minutes ago, dhicks said:

 

I've found Debian's auto-update facility to be reliable and easy to set up, if you haven't got that set up already. It doesn't really answer your question, but at least you don't have to worry if your servers are up-to-date, which is one less thing.

Same here (for Ubuntu). I have any security updates installed automatically, and then I have apt monitored along with other things on our monitoring platform (Checkmk). Auto-updates massively reduces the number of times I need to login to the servers. Not using Ansible but I fancy it at some point.

Edited March 18 by jthompson

[MatthewL]

Thanks for the replies, updates are not a massive concern as I have another util dealing with that, but will have a look at the others.