Chronicles of a washed up systems administrator.
In the basement, M. Bison (mbision.foxhop.net.), a T430 with a cracked screen runs quietly with his lid closed, acting as a SmartOS hypervisor to 3 Solaris derived zones and 4 KVM ubuntu guests.
One of these guests is the oldest of the bunch and his name is Akuma (akuma.foxhop.net.).
Akuma and I go way back, over 13 years now. At one point Akuma was a physical machine, who ran FreeBSD and then later Ubuntu 6.04 with it's own guest kernel virtual machines.
Akuma has been "home base" for as long as I remember. A place where shit got done. A place to perform operations. A place to "jump" from with SSH.
It makes sense that Akuma would evolve and gain many roles over the years.
Akuma performs DNS caching and forwarding for my LAN, it acts as the internal authoritative Nameserver for foxhop.net., and is the Salt Master for all my hosts both internally (hosted at my house) and externally in the "cloud".
Akuma uses tmux with default settings to allow for a "remote shell" vibe.
This allows me attach to my session running on Akuma from anywhere in the world.
Only problem is, Akuma reboots weekly when M. Bison triggers a complete backup of all guests. Backups are stored on Guile, the FreeNAS server, uncompressed since disk space is cheap and this process allows for downtime, however I try to limit it.
Since Akuma reboots each week, I needed a way to create tmux sessions on boot if I wanted to continue to use it as my "home base", and I did so using SaltStack:
create-tmux-session-on-boot:
cron.present:
- comment: "create a new tmux session on system boot"
- name: /bin/bash /home/fox/new-tmux
- identifier: "create-tmux-session-on-boot"
- special: "@reboot"
- user: fox
- require:
- user: fox
This salt state results in the following crontab -l entry:
# create a new tmux session on system boot SALT_CRON_IDENTIFIER:create-tmux-session-on-boot
@reboot /bin/bash /home/fox/new-tmux
And of course I what tutorial wouldn't be complete without a script! (/home/fox/new-tmux) :
#!/bin/bash
# The -A flag makes new-session behave like attach-session if session-name
# already exists; in this case, -D behaves like -d to attach-session.
tmux new-session -d -A -s "remote-shell" "weechat-curses"
# also create a couple windows to use as "remote shells".
tmux new-window
tmux new-window
# finally attach to the new session!
tmux a -t "remote-shell"
Thanks for joining me on this escape into the world of computers.
This website is hosted on Ryu (ryu.foxhop.net) another Ubuntu guest running on M. Bison, humming away downstairs on that T430 with a cracked screen, but thats a story for another time.
Please feel free to comment below if you have suggestions for this post.