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Subsections


Maintenance

Multiple Servers

In order to maintain multiple servers running Open Admin, I have done the following:

  1. In the /opt/openadmin folder (where all schools are located), I have created an updates folder.

  2. In this folder place a copy of the oacopy.pl perl script (from the utility directory of the download) and modify them to copy files into all of your school folders (add your school directories to the list).

    An upcoming version will have to take into account modifications to a file that are specific to a school. (ie. customization). If those changed files are placed in a directory at the school level (ie. same level as etc and cgi) instead of where they normally run and then a symbolic link added to the normal folder pointing to the custom folder, a new oafscopy.pl script could detect the presence of the symbolic link and not copy the update for this school (although it should warn the user of this event).

  3. When updating scripts, you would copy the update(s) to this update folder and use oacopy to update all of the other schools on the same server. If there are multiple scripts, they can then be tarred/zipped into a single archive file. This file is then copied to the other server using scp. I use date archive names (i.e. OA20101010a.tgz for the first archive of October 10th, 2010).

  4. On the other server, move the archive file into the /opt/openadmin/updates folder, uncompress it, and then use oacopy to update all of the other schools. This can be done quite quickly for small numbers of servers.

In the Notes folder, mentioned above, I place notes to myself about particular settings in each school, any customizations for any school, etc. This is particularly important for student numbers since I assign each school a particular range of student numbers (which is stored in the /cgi/entry/studentnumber file). I use a large range to that this setting would last at least 6 years or better. At that point, a centralized (per division) routine can be used to assign division student numbers. For now, this method of storing the next available student number in a file is simple and reliable.


up previous contents
Up: Open Administration for Schools Previous: LDAP - Installation

2010-12-24