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Updates to system administration labs

Scott Cosentino requested to merge sys-admin-automation-changes into main

Why is this change being made?

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During a full test of our instance automation, I noticed a few instructions that needed updating, as well as a few instructions that will change based on machine images and SSH instructions.

Most notable changes:

  • The SSH user is now root, so all SSH instructions should use root rather than ec2-user (ex: ssh -i <keyfile_name> root@<vm_ip_address>). This should also avoid issues where a student misses a sudo since their user is sudo by default.
  • All instances of dnf are now apt-get. Example: sudo apt-get install -y curl policycoreutils perl postfix.
    • The image being used is now Debian as opposed to RedHat (RedHat costs us around $80/month/student extra, and it doesn't really add a benefit). Everything works the same, just these commands change due to package manager differences
  • All of the other changes are just small UI differences, or tabs for markdown formatting

I have tested all of these changes, they all look to work. If you want to try out the changes, you can use these instances I generated today with the automation: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/customer-success/education-services/lab-infrastructure/-/issues/32#note_1968821434. Instance SSH key is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Np2-8ajNKEnucubpcUpQnex27JNNp0aS/view

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Commits

  • Updates to system administration labs
Edited by Scott Cosentino

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