AfNOG 2014 Workshop on Network Technology

Track SS-E: Scalable Internet Services

Introduction

This course on Scalable Internet Services is part of the AfNOG 2014 Workshop on Network Technology, held in conjunction with the AfNOG meeting in Djibouti, May-June 2014.

We use hands-on training in a well-equipped classroom over a five-day period to teach skills required for the configuration and operation of large scale Internet services.

Who should attend

Technical staff who are now providing Internet Services, or those who will be involved in the establishment and/or provisioning of a basic national Internet Services in the country.

Prerequisites

Experience using and administering *NIX Servers, Name Servers, Web Servers and Mail Servers.

Instructors

Participants

Timetable

Management

Details for project management of the training

Editing this page

Please file an issue requesting to be added as an administrator of the AfNOG organisation on GitHub.

Mailing list

The instructors group on Google Groups:

• Email address: afnog-sse@googlegroups.com
• Web interface: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/afnog-sse

Topics and Instructors

• Welcome - CW?
• DNS - JA?
• RADIUS - CW
• Apache - EN
• Virtualization - LM
• Load Balancing - LM
• Monitoring - KC
• Exim - CW
• Mail (Dovecot, Webmail, scalability) - KC
• Security and Availability - CW
• Closing Survey - CW

See the wiki page.

Coordinating the lab-setup

Who is arriving when?

• CW on 22/05 around 14h
• EN on 24/05
• KC on 25/05 early morning
• JA on 25/05 at 0900

Administration

All done by CW unless anyone else wants to.

• Student numbers and names
• Classroom setup, networking, virtual machine images, cable management
• Notices - door, timetable, complaints box, wifi password
• Introductory talk - welcome, topic poll, complaints box
• Time management during the workshop (breaks, lunch, etc)
• Set alarms for break times
• Ensure that every topic has an instructor and enough time allocated
• Ensure that participants are receiving any assistance necessary
• Student name verification for certificates
• Coordinate the class group photo
• Liaise with the secretariat on any other issues that may be required
• Ensure that all course materials are placed on the workshop folder for CD burning at the end of the workshop
• Ensure that the participants complete and return the feedback form
• Download and serve any files needed, e.g. FreeBSD ISO images (for virtualisation) and packages (for pkg_add mirror)

TODO

• Student numbers and names

Meta (about this site)

Source code (Markdown)

• Latest master is in GitHub.
• Clone an offline copy with Markdown source (no HTML) at git@github.com:afnog/sse.git.

Generated HTML

• Created with Jekyll
• Possibly outdated copy in GitHub.
• Browsable online at http://afnog.github.io/sse/.
• Clone an offline copy (HTML, not Markdown) at git@github.com:afnog/afnog.github.io.git.

Presentations

Presentations use a special format to invoke remark on the Markdown source files:

• The Markdown source is called presentation.md (so there can be only one per directory).
• In the same directory is a file called index.md, which tells Jekyll to use a specific layout (template file) to generate the HTML: _layouts/presentation.html.
• This file is generic and the same for all presentations. It loads the Remark source code, and then loads the presentation.md file from the same directory using AJAX. So the URL that you use to load it is very important in locating the correct presentation.md file.

Generating the HTML

If you’re using Ruby 1.8, you may need to install Ruby 1.9 first.

Warning: This command by default will overwrite ../afnog.github.io/sse, since it assumes that you have both https://github.com/afnog/sse/ and https://github.com/afnog/afnog.github.io/ checked out side-by-side (for example in SparkleShare).

If you want it to overwrite a different directory (where it will write the generated HTML files), you can specify it as a command-line argument to Make:

make DST_DIR=/tmp/site

You will need to install Jekyll to generate the HTML files:

sudo gem install jekyll execjs therubyracer

Then run make to build them once, in the destination directory:

make

Or run make watch to tell Jekyll to stay running, watch for source files changing, and generate a new HTML file when they do (ideal for modifying presentations on the fly):

make watch

Publishing the HTML

You can use make sync to run lsyncd (which you must have installed) to automatically rsync the content to the workshop server, http://www.ws.afnog.org. You will need to check the SYNC_HOST and SYNC_DIR in the Makefile, which must point to the destination host and directory which will be overwritten.

make sync