COSas

Here are COS&HT admin scripts that automate the life and backups of our deployments for the past couple of decades. They are portable enough for Solaris 7-11 and illumos, Linux and BSD.

Select few are even ported to MS Windows batch-file scripting just to provide similar functionality that we needed in our portable deployments.

Modern users might have use for the agent- scripts to probe stuff using just the telnet client as a means to access TCP/IP services, and the agents to inpect filesystem sizes and availability (think networked FS which may be inaccessible sometimes - programs should block on this forever, especially not if cron spawns them regularly); the timerun.sh to limit the time a spawned process can run; proctree.sh to send signals to a process and its children; the test-archive.sh to validate downloads and other long-term archives; and scripts which revolve around backups - especially clean-dump.sh and clean-zfs-snaps.sh which help to maintain the specified baseline of available disk space on the backup storage host, and dumper-generic.sh as a way to archive specified locations into a tarball with a standardized filename (including hostname and timestamp of the backup); and the .include files with useful routines, such as detection of available archivation and compression utilities and appropriate setup for backup scripts to compress their dumps with whatever is available.

Disclaimers

Be wary of hardcodings and assumptions that may be present somewhere, at least until this code is digested and made more generally applicable.

If some edges seem too rough…​ oh well, there was a time when we learned the shell-scripting best practices, the hard way ;)

If some programs evoke questions "why did you invent a wheel and not use program XXX to achieve this goal?", the common counter-answer would be "was program XXX around 20 years ago? did it work on all OSes we need?" Still, the original question would be valid, so the politically correct one would be "we got used to these tools we know and use everywhere for years without a hitch and serious downsides…​ so if it ain’t broke — don’t fix" ;)

Repo layout

The repository is split into subdirectories (original project had all scripts in the bin/ subdirectory, so packaging recipes may need to get adapted):

• bat/ — the MS Windows batch files for a few needed automations;

• common/ — the bulk of system interrogation and automation scripts used as a baseline in our deployments lifecycle and/or called from other projects;

• sjs/ — scripts that automated specifically some jobs for Sun Java System (enterprise software stack) deployments, like backups of Sun/Oracle DSEE LDAP servers, probing Access Manager/OpenSSO login service functionality, etc. They rely on some common scripts, just are not of interest to everyone.

Metadata directories include:

• packaging/svr4pkg/ and packaging/rpm/ for respective packaging recipes;

• services/smf-manifests/ for installation of a regularly running script as a service under the system service framework (currently only for Solaris SMF).

Historical note

Note	This project’s opensourced (Github) life starts without a copy of tracked pre-history, as its initial code drop is merged and sanitized from internal and end-user projects.

First in-house packages were built in 2005 for delivery to customers, though some scripts may have started their life even before that, and evolved for some opensource deployments later on. So code up to this point is:

Copyright (C) 2004-2014 Jim Klimov, JSC COS&HT
Copyright (C) 2004-2016 Jim Klimov

with helpful input from colleagues in JSC COS&HT which helped shape the next steps of development.