Speakers: Jan Welker & Michael Husar
Level: Advanced, Lecture
Excerpt: As client services provider at a university, we face a heterogeneous but rather windows- heavy environment. It comes with the unique challenge to provide local support staff with tools to handle diverse Mac client requirements.
In this talk, we present our approach to systems administration: How we use Ansible in pull mode for client configuration management and how we integrate it into our current Active Directory and Git infrastructure. The benefits: Infrastructure as code without additional backend components, Active Directory as a graphical frontend for our support staff and the freedom to modify and optimize our tool chain.
Description: We as systems administrators have several requirements when it comes to our environment: We want to stay flexible in regards to the tools we use. We want to keep overhead for daily business at a minimum and last but not least, we want to provide a workflow our coworkers and support staff feel comfortable using. How can we achieve all this?
The answer: Use what’s already available in your environment. Do not customize tools, but develop small scripts to glue them together and optimize your workflow.
As client services provider at a university, we face a heterogeneous but rather windows- heavy environment. It comes with the unique challenge to provide local support staff with tools to handle diverse client requirements.
In this talk, we present our approach to systems administration: How we use Ansible in pull mode for client configuration management and how we integrate it into our current Active Directory and Git infrastructure. The benefits: Infrastructure as code without additional backend components, Active Directory as a graphical frontend for our support staff and the freedom to modify and optimize our tool chain.
About the speakers
Michael Husar – MSc – University of Basel
Michael Husar
Deputy Team Leader Client Services, University of Basel
Starting with a Sinclair Spektrum Michael found his way to Apple through a Macintosh SE. Michael studied Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology and worked as IT Consultant across different business areas. He took probable one of the last chances to get ACSA certified and focused about 10 years ago on enterprise Mac management. His team at the University of Basel is responsible for deploying operating systems as efficient as possible and therefore concentrating on automation wherever useful.
Jan Welker – System Engineer – University of Basel
Jan started using open-source tools passionately at around 1999. In 2008 Jan decided to make his passion into a profession and changed to the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI) as a System Administrator where he administrated Linux Workstations and Servers. It was at the FMI where Jan was introduced to the very high demands of researchers and the rapid change of requirements of those researchers. He stopped worrying and learned to love the crazy environment of a research facility.
In 2010 Jan looked for a even greater challenge and changed to a Bioinformatics research group at the University of Basel, where he operated countless Linux Servers, a ~2k Core Beowulf cluster and the Linux Workstations as technical staff. From there Jan moved to the central IT Services of the University of Basel where he migrated the macOS, Linux Workstations and Network Storage of the Structural Biology groups into the central University infrastructure.
Nowadays Jan works as a Systems Engineer at the Client Services (CS) Team of the University of Basel and is responsible for Linux Clients and the Linux Backends of the CS Team. He is a co-author and a core maintainer of the ANTS-Famework which he and his team designed to meet the steadily increasing demands of the rapidly changing Linux and macOS environment of a top 100 University.
The ANTS-Framework is currently managing ~1k Linux and macOS clients at the University of Basel. It has been published under the GPLv3 License and is available to everyone.