Remote System Management

Remote System Management (rsm) is a set of remctl scripts that let a remote user run some common administrative tasks on a remote machine. It is primarily designed to let automated systems (like Nagios or Splunk) take corrective actions based on alerting.

The code is in /afs/.ugcs/ugcs-admin/source/rsm. It is not in a debian package- instead, the Makefile in /afs/.ugcs/ugcs-admin/cfengine/hosts/rsm copies the files to cfengine, and then cfengine distributes it. If you add a new script, run "make_rsm_remctl_config" to re-generate the remctl list of valid commands.

The ACL for it is in cfengine/global/rsm_acl. It is distributed via cfengine. Another config file, rsm_config, is also in cfengine/global, and distributed via cfengine.

=Commands=

mountfs
mountfs will call "mount filesystem" to try to re-mount an unmounted filesystem (particularly network filesystems). For security reasons, the filesystem must already be in /etc/fstab.

restart_service
restart_service will run /etc/init.d/service restart only if service is in $RESTART_SERVICES in /etc/rsm_config

synctime
synctime will run /usr/sbin/ntpdate $NTP_SERVER, where NTP_SERVER is taken from /etc/rsm_config. Unfortunately this will not fix time sync issues that breaks kerberos because remctl requires kerberos to authenticate, so in practice this functionality is useless.