Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Sunday 03 Apr 2011, Andrew Lynn wrote: [snip] Please - at least - write up this aspect of the project as a white paper that we can circulate to govt. funded intstitutions. If you need help with the non-technical documentation and research, I can see if some students from our university can get involved in doing it as research project. Would be glad to do that provided (a) the client gets discretionary control on the contents of the paper and (b) someone tells me what a white paper is actually supposed to contain. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
Raju Mathur said on Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 10:22:09PM +0530,: Once again, sorry to dash cold water on expectations (though with the I fully agree and concur with the need to protect the client's privacy / terms of contract. I hope you will be able to give some answers to the following specific questions. 1. Debian has 3 sections - main, non-free and contrib. The classification is based on licensing /and/ freeness of dependencies. Apart from hardware specific packages, anything that is not in Debian? 2. Debian takes pride in packaging anything with a free (as in freedom) license. Did you have to customise any package? (in any way - like recompile against a specific library version; rebuild a kernel,e tc) ? Aw - I recall a post you made long time back about a samba installation. ;-D 3. What was the documentation about? As you have rightly pointed, the community has no use for documentation on things like reducing / elevating user privileges within the installation. Or how they manage the sudoers group. Actually, I should confess that you had to do any documentation at all - I do an occasional single PC install, and most of documentation is available on the F! key. But of course, we are not comparing cats and horses! -- Mahesh T. Pai || That men do not learn much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us. --Aldous Huxley ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Sunday 03 Apr 2011, Mahesh T. Pai wrote: Raju Mathur said on Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 08:35:08AM +0530,: installed is from the standard Debian repositories -- Testing on the servers, and Stable on the clients. As far as I know, there's nothing I find this choice rather strange. It is usually the other way around stable on servers and testing (even unstable / experimental) on clients. Why? Is it because they are not using the typical desktop / office / productivity suites? Testing on servers since we needed the latest packages. Stable on desktops since it's, er, stable :) Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the organisation. T and I have been working on documenting standard procedures, and in the past 2 months or so most of them have been handed over to the client's support team, along with some scripts that make life easier for them Do you/company plan to make some of this documentation available for use to wider community or will they be only for the company? I would think a lot of people would be interested in such documentation. Vikas ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Manish mailtomanish.sha...@gmail.comwrote: This is great. Congratulations! Are you also planning to document the experience and approach as a case study suitable for PHBs? Looking forward to see it in the likes of DQ, PCQ, LFYs, Profit etc. It is amusing to read the whole story of FOSS's ability and the potential it have. The complete debian desktop within 10min over the network with only a network port as requirement is panacea for the industry like 'call centres' where bringing up the machine ASAP is always high on demand. I'm sure you must have done some tailoring while deciding on the packages to have in the image, please share some details on that as well. Congratulations!!! Regards, Yash ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Friday 01 Apr 2011, Vikas Rawal wrote: L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the organisation. T and I have been working on documenting standard procedures, and in the past 2 months or so most of them have been handed over to the client's support team, along with some scripts that make life easier for them Do you/company plan to make some of this documentation available for use to wider community or will they be only for the company? I would think a lot of people would be interested in such documentation. Well, a lot of the documentation is specific for our client's operations, and I doubt if we'd be allowed to release that, and even if we were it would be of limited usefulness to anyone else. Apart from that there is some documentation on setting up various types of systems; now that we could hypothetically release, but again there's tons of client-specific stuff embedded into that. In general, then, the answer to your question would be no. However, I really haven't examined the docs with a microscope so far to see which would be generic enough to release (and be useful), so I guess we could take the decision on a case by case basis -- if the opportunity comes up to solve a problem by sharing a doc, and if the doc is generic enough, we'd have no problem in releasing it. The real issue here is that one of the things the client paid us to do was document. I see no easy way to take those commissioned documents and release them generally without the client's consent. In any case Tirveni and I are available to share whatever we've learnt if anyone asks a specific related question. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Friday 01 Apr 2011, Yashpal Nagar wrote: On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Manish mailtomanish.sha...@gmail.comwrote: This is great. Congratulations! Are you also planning to document the experience and approach as a case study suitable for PHBs? Looking forward to see it in the likes of DQ, PCQ, LFYs, Profit etc. It is amusing to read the whole story of FOSS's ability and the potential it have. The complete debian desktop within 10min over the network with only a network port as requirement is panacea for the industry like 'call centres' where bringing up the machine ASAP is always high on demand. I'm sure you must have done some tailoring while deciding on the packages to have in the image, please share some details on that as well. Once again, sorry to dash cold water on expectations (though with the mercury rising cold water isn't such a bad thing!), but we /are/ bound by verbal NDAs to the client. Whatever is generic (and doesn't take too much effort to put into publishable form) can be shared. Whatever is specific to the client, or reveals aspects of his operations or strategy, is absolutely confidential... I wouldn't want to breach anyone's trust, and I'm sure you wouldn't want me to do that either. I apologise for us coming off as information hoarders (though I do believe that whatever we've done and are doing is aligned with the spirit and intent of freedom in software); on the other hand, when we agreed to do the project we made a commitment to the client, and that is not a commitment that we can retrospectively withdraw from. The only alternative was to not make the commitment and not do the project, but WTH, if we hadn't done the project this discussion wouldn't have arisen anyway. Thanks for all the congratulations, folks! After the money g they make life in the FOSS world worth living :) Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
[ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
Background: The client is a large call-out business headquartered in NOIDA with call centres in 5 other cities in India, including New Delhi. At the time we started, they had no IT or automation on the call floor at all. Before you see the words call centre and freak out, let me assure you that this is one of those professional ones -- any telecaller found calling a DNC number is immediately and publicly terminated. In fact, preventing calling of DNC was one of the reasons they wanted to give up manual calling and switch to an IT solution where call-outs could be controlled. All the implementation decisions were taken by Tirveni and I in conjunction with the client's technical team. We decided to go with Asterisk for the telephony part and Linux desktops with headsets for the tele-callers. To answer the specific questions Sudhanwa and Nirmalya put up: On Thu, 3/31/11, Sudhanwa Jogalekar sudhanwa@gmail.com wrote: A. On what parameters selection of a particular distro is done. Pricing, support, stability etc. etc. The key element here was stability and availability of packages. Pure desktop distributions were ruled out due to their (typical) quick obsolescence and, to some extent, lack of testing. This left the enterprise-grade distributions like RH, CentOS and Debian. RH and CentOS don't have the wide variety of packages that Debian offers, so we decided on Debian. Of course, our own affinity for Debian may have played some part in that decision :) B. Is the decision taken by some central IT department and imposed on all others or is it coming from user requirements across the country? The decision was made at headquarters. As I said, the organisation is pretty raw where IT maturity is concerned, and having a strong, technically sound, experienced CTO at the helm more or less defined the direction for the whole company. Of course, business decisions are still made at the operations level, so the technology strategy has to ensure that it's in sync with and can service business requirements in what is, after all, a very dynamic environment. C. How the organisation is going to get support? Inhouse? services from vendors or consultants? Outsourced activity completely? L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the organisation. T and I have been working on documenting standard procedures, and in the past 2 months or so most of them have been handed over to the client's support team, along with some scripts that make life easier for them (e.g. quickly make new users -- you wouldn't believe the employee turnover these call centres have!). We still handle some L2 and most L3 support, and that is likely to be the model going forward too. Incidentally, anyone with Linux technical competence interested in a job? ;-) D. What is the typical configuration of desktops, servers. Desktops are commodity 2GB RAM, 3GHz Pentium dual-core machines. They seem to be handling plain voice telephony over SIP just fine. Servers are much larger -- Asterisk needs a load of power to handle 1000 simultaneous users, and we've split up functionality so that the SIP handling and the PSTN connectivity are done by different servers. Servers are typically 2x4 core or 4x4 core Xeon class boxes with SAS disks. E. What was the timeframe to complete the project? We started around mid-December (2010), got the servers by mid-Jan and had one centre live on Asterisk within about 15 days of that. Planning out the architecture in advance made a lot of difference to the overall speed of implementation. Tirveni did tons of preseed magic on the desktop front, and we now have a process where you can put a bare machine on the LAN, select Boot from network (PXE boot) and have a working, customised Debian desktop ready for use in 10 minutes. F. What are the most troublesome situations you face during the whole exercise. Technical, manpower handling, financial etc. AFAIR, the most troublesome portions were (a) handling user creation, (b) changing business requirements and (c) diagnosing and fixing Asterisk-PSTN issues remotely. User creation went through multiple phases of streamlining, until now we have a process by which a support person can login to a desktop, run a command, feed in the user ID, get it validated against a central database and have the desktop ready for the user in about 30 seconds. It's still not perfect, but we're getting there. As mentioned before, business requirements keep changing, and keeping up with them is quite a challenge. This is not due to lack of foresight on the organisation's part -- just that business needs, TRAI regulations, security issues, mandatory controls, etc. are so dynamic. And if you're sitting in NOIDA and trying to manage an Asterisk box connected to the PSTN 2000KM away, I have one word of advice: don't! We're learning as we go along, but Asterisk diagnostics are cryptic to say the least, and telcos
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
2011/4/1 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) r...@linux-delhi.org Tirveni did tons of preseed magic on the desktop front, and we now have a process where you can put a bare machine on the LAN, select Boot from network (PXE boot) and have a working, customised Debian desktop ready for use in 10 minutes. I would love to know the details of the process. We have tried to do PXE boot for installation in our college labs, but got stuck somewhere both the times we tried. -- Kartik Singhal http://k4rtik.wordpress.com/ ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
