How one admin zoo tamed

Good day, dear Habrausers!

I prepared this post for the Day of the system administrator, but did not have time and missed the moment. So, our dear system administrators, with the holiday that has passed you, this indicative story will surely be familiar to each of you.

So, the story is written from the words of the system administrator, who suddenly became the owner of the whole "zoo".

A couple of years ago, I worked as an administrator on a permanent basis and was amazed at how an incoming employee can perform such work. The situation changed dramatically when the crisis ruined my company. Everyone began to save hard, and finding a new permanent job was not easy. Therefore, as a temporary measure, I became one of those to whom I had recently treated condescendingly - an incoming admin in a couple (and then three) of small firms. Each of them paid a little bit, so my irregular visits were in the order of things ... until the next turning point.

Once, I decided to postpone the planned visit to one of the companies, because the routine could wait, and urgent business was not expected there. The next time, the first phrase of the chief accountant, said instead of a greeting, was an unexpected remark: "But we could have done it without you!" Then she told me about the mobile phone that was always turned off, at the same time she remembered all the accumulated little things and was about to leave, but I stopped her and asked to explain the situation.

It turned out that over the past week the management decided to open two new departments at once and as soon as possible. All furniture and computers have already been purchased for them. Then I was amused by the idea that the chief accountant considers computers a kind of interior items. When she showed me the contract, the humor seemed black.

The documents did not describe in detail the configurations of purchased computers. Everywhere, only their general characteristics were indicated, such as the “MidiTower case with b / p ATX”. But the total amount was very impressive. Apparently, using the illiteracy of the customer, the supplier decided to vparit everything that was lying around in warehouses. Well, they bought it, okay, I thought. “Not with my money.”

However, after a week I had a lot of surprises, and there were no pleasant ones among them. The brought computers didn’t turn on, as I was informed by telephone in the morning. The reason was simple: none of them had an operating system installed. All computers came pristine according to the contract.

Upon arrival at the office, I became an involuntary participant in the conflict. The director tears and mosques, the chief accountant is like a beaten dog, and one of the newly-made department heads has a natural panic. Last week, the newly hired employees began to come to him, and their workplaces are not yet equipped. Almost immediately, the entire leadership rushes to me and demands "do everything right."

I explain to them that the equipment was purchased without me. I did not participate in her choice. To turn this pile of iron into equipment for two departments, you must first install OSes, drivers, updates and various software on each. To combine them into LAN - the same time is required. I am ready to do it all, but for the appropriate payment, of course.

We spent almost the whole day discussing the problem. The director and the chief accountant tried to accuse the supplier of fraud. By naivety, the management believed that all computers are sold “with Windows, Word, and Wi-Fi.” I hardly explained the real situation to them and offered to buy everything I needed: network equipment, software licenses, etc.

When we calculated the additional costs, the director’s fervor faded first, and then mine. Buying software cost almost as much as you already spent on computers. Installation and configuration of all computers would take at best one and a half weeks. Nobody could wait so long.

During the break, an idea occurred to me: to set up one computer, and then just clone it to others. Then it all seemed like a good thought, and they gave me a green light. Until the evening I was transported with installation, updates and settings on the first computer.

The next day, armed with a "clonzilla", I already anticipated an imminent triumph, but there it was! The full disk image was successfully written to the second computer, but it did not turn on again. The system partition was not seen at boot. I tried to make cloning with other programs - the same thing. Perform deployment over the network - built-in network cards are not visible, and only part of the computers. Dismantled a couple of them and ... let's say, very surprised.

Have you ever played the game "find ten differences"? So, there were more than ten differences. In fact, only the hulls were the same. Everything else is different. Motherboards, processors, drives ... In separate instances they even put a simple SSD at 100 - 128 MB instead of a hard drive. In general, the zoo, and more. In addition, the BIOS settings, although everywhere were defaulted, were essentially different from each other. For example, in some SATA ports were in AHCI mode, and in others - native / compatible. It is clear that simple cloning cannot solve the problem here.

Already anticipating a huge front of manual work, I climbed into the forums in search of at least some clues to reduce routine operations. Googled about different methods of deployment from images, installation options over the network - it was not that. In one of the articles, it was mentioned that Acronis Snap Deploy can perform cloning in a heterogeneous environment. That is, you can make a clone of one computer and deploy it on the second, third, etc., even with other hardware.

I downloaded the trial version, made a trial deployment. Happened! I tried again - success again! However, after another busy car, the program required a license for a fully functional version. I looked at how much the license costs. Buying them on all cars turned out to be cheaper than one computer. Convinced of the need to purchase a director. The chief accountant did not resist. Updated to full versions and continued deployment.

Of course, it wasn’t very easy - I had to delve into the settings, look for drivers, configure the PXE server and do a lot more, but all these were trifles of the preparatory stage. Having scrutinized once and prepared the image of the reference system, we could guaranteedly and quickly deploy it (almost) on anything - at least ten times, at least ten thousand.

As a result, the estimated one and a half weeks of manual labor turned into two days of monitoring the most automated operations. The new employees did not have time to change their minds, and I remained the administrator on a constant basis and now I read training webinars on backup and data protection.

Conclusions:

1) We all know that the work of the administrator is such that you have to deal with different “circus / zoo” from users, the main thing is not to give up and look for the right solutions to problems, there is always a way out, in my practice this has been confirmed;
2) Any routine process can be automated - do not be lazy to google and learn new practices;
3) Cloning speeds up the commissioning of typical jobs;
4) The deployment procedure can be performed on bare metal and even on different equipment;
5) Deployment can be performed from bootable media or through a PXE server;
6) The necessary settings on each computer can be set both before and after deployment.

Here you can listen to my training webinars on backup and data protection .