UnixMidtermServer

Server for a mid term project for a Unix System Administration course

Overview

Create 3 servers and 1 dashboard api/agent that monitors the servers, displays performance statistics, reboots the servers when they fail, and includes basic notification support.

Disclaimer

This server is designed to be cloned into a GCP Google Cloud Ubuntu VM instance, and connected to from a dashboard that has Surxe/UnixMidtermDashboard cloned. The get_metrics.sh script may not function as expected in other environments and may require alterations for other operating systems during the dependency installation stage.

Setup

1. Within the GCP instance, git clone https://github.com/MightBeRaptor/UnixMidtermServer.git
2. cd UnixMidtermServer
3. bash src/update_dependencies.sh - Installs dependencies for checking metrics and stressing the server
4. bash src/add_user_groups.sh - Creates user and groups for the server to be added to
5. bash src/systemd_setup.sh - Creates systemd file for the stresser. This will cause it to always run stresser for a random amount of seconds.
6. bash src/add_crontab.sh - Adds a crontab entry that runs python3 src/server.py every 5 minutes
   1. Open the crontab with crontab -e and edit etg1717 to your own username/path in both portions of the command

Starting the server socket

1. The crontab will start the server (if its not already up) with python3 src/server.py
2. Every 5 minutes of the dashboard's runtime, it will request the server to run:
   1. bash src/stresser.sh - Stresses the server
   2. bash src/get_metrics.sh - Retrieve's metrics and writes them to data/metrics_<timestamp>.txt
   3. python3 src/parse_metrics.py - Parses the metrics from the raw txt into a readable json format in data/metrics_<timestamp>.json
   4. Sends data/metrics_<timestamp.json back to the dashboard at data/serverN/metrics_<timestamp>.json, where serverN is pulled from the hostname
3. When the server is no longer connected to the dashboard, it will run

Disable Stresser

If the stresser.service becomes problematic, it can be disabled using the following commands:

1. sudo systemctl disable stresser.service - Prevents launch on boot
2. sudo systemctl stop stresser.service - Stops the stresser.service from working
3. systemctl status stresser.service - Displays the status of stresser.service to make sure it is disabled
4. pkill -9 stress-ng - Ends the currently running stress process To renable this service, run the command bash src/systemd_setup.sh