Vines Services Web Application

The vines-services gem provides a web user interface available at http://localhost:5280/ immediately after running vines-services init.

Systems

The Systems screen is the terminal window into remote shell sessions with systems and services.

This chat session is with a service called All Systems that contains two machines: orchid.local and fedora.wonderland.lit. Commands are sent to both systems simultaneously and their output is returned to the web terminal. We're interacting with a real bash shell on the remote systems, so we can use all the unix commands we already know and love. We can change directories, redirect output, and connect commands with pipes.

Services

Services are dynamic groups of systems based on their attributes, gathered by the agents. The agent collects data about the system with Ohai, the same gem that Chef uses for configuration management.

As attributes of the systems change over time, they are automatically added or removed from services. For example, when you provision a new web server, Vines will automatically add it to the Web Servers service we've defined. This lets us manage large groups of systems together as one unit.

VinesQL

Service criteria is written using a simple query language, called VinesQL. A service containing Fedora and Ubuntu servers in the 192.168.1.x subnet that have been running for more than 5 minutes would be:

kernel.name is 'Linux' and
  (platform is 'fedora' or platform is 'ubuntu') and
    ipaddress starts with '192.168.1.' and
      uptime_seconds > 300

The available system attributes and operators are listed in the services screen as a quick reference.

Permissions

Services allow us to define who is allowed to use which unix user accounts. We can give our trusted system administrators root access and others access just to the user ID's they need to do their work. It's a convenient way to avoid defining permissions on each machine separately with a sudoers file.

The built-in v user command uses these permissions to determine whether to allow a user ID switch.

$ v user
-> current: apache
   allowed: apache, mysql, pgsql
$ whoami
apache
$ v user pgsql
-> switched user to pgsql
$ whoami
pgsql
$ v user root
-> user switch not allowed
$ whoami
pgsql