Agent Overview

Agent Overview

The purpose of this section is to familiarize the user with the enStratus agent.

The enStratus agent is composed of a lightweight tomcat application used for communicating with the enStratus provisioning server and a set of associated shell scripts. The shell scripts are responsible for executing some actions on the server and are extensible by end users.

The agent listens on port 2003 and takes action based on user input as in the case of adding a user to a system ( the addUser script) and also automates actions such as attaching, formatting, encrypting, and mounting volumes as part of a fully automated enStratus deployment. Communication to and from the enStratus provisioning server is encrypted.

The enStratus agent is suitable for use on many popular GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Cent OS, and Fedora. Additionally, the enStratus agent works on Windows Server 2003/2008. The agent functions in both 32- and 64-bit environments.

The enStratus agent and the associated scripts can be found in /enstratus on a GNU/Linux system, and in C:\enstratus on a Windows server.

Functionality

Installing the enStratus agent opens the server to the full functionality provided by enStratus including user management, automation, scheduled termination, statistics, logging, and alerting.

enStratus will monitor servers that have the agent installed and alert when status changes occur as in the case of an unexpected termination of the server. In an automated deployment, enStratus will take the further step of restoring lost servers.

Dependencies

The enStratus agent has very few actual dependencies. Java, sysstat, and sudo are the minimum requirements for installing and using the enStratus agent. Packages such as cryptsetup provide for encryption of volumes using the linux unified key setup. Zip, unzip, xfsprogs, and mdadm are used in deployments and for creating, formatting, and attaching volumes.