AfNOG 2015 Workshop on Network Technology

Track SS-E: Scalable Internet Services

Introduction

This course on Scalable Internet Services is part of the AfNOG 2015 Workshop on Network Technology, held in conjunction with the AfNOG meeting in Tunisia, May-June 2015.

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 SS-E workshop.

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

There is a wiki page on course development.

Equipment

To host this track you will probably need the following equipment:

• 2 x Mac Minis or similar, quad core i7 2Ghz+, 16GB Ram, 250 GB SSD (to host 16 virtual machines each)
• Projector: VGA required, HDMI optional, screen/wall. Mac VGA and HDMI adaptors.
• Wifi: ideally wired and wireless on the same SSID with /24.
• Wired Ethernet ports: probably 4-8 ports for people with broken wireless and for instructors in our classroom.
• Power strips: 12 x 4 socket.
• Spare machines: 4 x reasonable desktop/laptop with 1 GB RAM and permission to reformat and install Ubuntu or FreeBSD.
• Sun shading: to be able to read the projected screen and not overheat in our rooms.
• White board, pens and eraser: at least 3 pens in 2 different colours.

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

Meta (about this site)

Quick Start (editing)

• Request write access to the repositories below, or clone them (and use the clone URLs instead)
• Install SparkleShare
• Add git@github.com:afnog/sse.git to it
• Add git@github.com:afnog/afnog.github.io.git to it
• Install Jekyll: sudo gem install jekyll execjs therubyracer
• Run make serve
• Edit the Markdown files in ~/SparkleShare/sse/.../*.md
• View the results in your browser at http://localhost:4000/…/*.html

Source code (Markdown)

• Latest master is in GitHub.
• Edit online using GitHub’s web editor, or:
• Clone an offline copy with Markdown source (no HTML) at git@github.com:afnog/sse.git.
• The syntax is parsed with Kramdown, which adds some useful extensions.

Generated HTML

• HTML files are auto-generated from Markdown by Jekyll - do not edit by hand!
• All files except those starting with --- (front matter) are copied literally from the source (sse) repository.
• 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.
• Some variables are stored in _config.yml, e.g. the year, and used with 2015 in HTML and Markdown files.

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.
• This means that you cannot use Kramdown extensions in presentations. No presentation.html files are generated because the presentation.md files deliberately do not have a “front matter” section which Jekyll requires.

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, for example with brew install lsyncd) 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