Using Debian to provide services to thousands

The talk will describe the services that the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) provides to its customers in the Greek academic community, with a target group of hundred of thousands of users. It will focus on the challenges faced when providing these services and the almost exclusive use of Debian to solve those.

GRNET offers a multitide of services to its customers, both on the Internet and computing fronts, on a multi-vendor environment. Over two hundred physical servers and twice as that on virtual servers are being operated by a handful of people, all but few running Debian.

Topics that will be mentioned are ranging from networking monitoring and identity to virtualization and cloud. The use and integration of multiple free software components on a Debian platform to accomplish those will be described along with a focus on high availability and automation of system administration tasks out of necessity and the ways and tools (e.g. d-i, puppet, Ganeti) to accomplish that.

Faidon Liambotis is on the Server & Services team of the Greek Research and Technology Network's Network Operations Center. He is also a Debian Developer.