Marshall University Open Source Lab

This page was setup to collect and document Open Source and Linux uses at Marshall University.

Linux support and documentation for on-campus users.

While Linux is not a fully supported desktop operating system at Marshall. The IT department at Marshall makes an effort to implement standards based technologies expected to work across all computing platforms. If you have a Linux related support question, contact the IT service desk to open a support ticket.

• MU VPN Linux client installation instructions, and (print friendly version)
• MU Wi-Fi Linux client wireless configuration, and (print friendly version).

Open Source Community involvement

Chef configuration management

Two of our System Administrators, Eric G. Wolfe and Gerald L. Hevener Jr. are Approved Contributors, and active members of the Chef community.

• Eric's development fork for Chef cookbooks here
• Gerald's development fork for Chef cookbooks here
• Cookbook for managing and installing yumrepos: including vmware-tools, Dell Open Manage, Fedora EPEL, and ELFF repositories.
• Cookbook for managing snmp: Configures and installs net-snmp packages.

Having standardized on RHEL and CentOS at Marshall... We really wanted an easy way to deploy the latest, and greatest, version of Chef to our servers. Using rvm we rolled our own makeself installers. The installer even builds the most recent version of Ruby for the machine its running on. Then installs the current stable chef-client from Ruby gems, what a deal!

See the README on github for additional information.

The source code, and embedded installation scripts, are also available on github:

Zenoss Network Management

The Linux Administration team has been piloting Zenoss Core internally as a replacement for our proprietary Network Monitoring System.

• Here is some of the monitoring code we've written to extend SNMP functionality. Its also included as an SNMP extend example in our Chef snmp cookbook

Open Source Documentation and Presentations

Red Hat Open-iSCSI and Device-Mapper-Multipath HOWTO

Members of our System Administration team have collaborated to bring you this step-by-step technical guide. This guide comprehensively documents installation and configuration of Open-iSCSI and Device Mapper Multipath on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.