Trouble-Maker

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Introduction

Being a system administrator is full of interesting challenges. We like this. However, some of these challenges can be problematic, if they cause service interrupts on production systems. Most system administrators have run into the situation where something is wrong, the server is down, and we don't know what is going on. The project attempts to help.

There are a lot of tools out there to make the system administrator's life easier. However, no tool is a replacement for properly understanding the system and experience in troubleshooting unknown situations. This is where trouble-maker comes in. Unlike other projects, we do not attempt to solve problems -- we cause them.

When installed and run, this project will randomly select a problem from its set of issues and make it happen on your system. This can give you experience dealing with:

• Dealing with partially accurate user reporting of problems
• Troubleshooting boot problems
• Troubleshooting service configuration problems
• Troubleshooting (simulated) hardware problems

It should be obvious, but we shall say it anyway. . . DO NOT INSTALL THIS SYSTEM ON A PRODUCTION MACHINE!!!!

Systems

This project is primarily developed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but is intended to be as multi-platform as possible. It consists of three components:

• The trouble-engine is written in a cross platform manner, so as to run on as many target platforms as possible.
• The trouble-modules are written so as to indicate which systems they apply to, and what pre-requisites they have.
• The trouble-module-builder is an optional system designed to simplify packaging trouble-module files into actual modules.

At this time, the following operating systems are supported:

Operating System	Version	Level of Support	Maintainer
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Also: CentOS, Whitebox, and Tao Linux )	3 (4 - in progress)	Primary	Josh More
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server	9 (10 - in progress)	Primary	Josh More
Fedora Project	2 (3, 4 and 5 - in progress)	Secondary	Josh More
Free BSD	5.2.1	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
	4.9	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
SCO OpenServer	5.x	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
Slackware Linux	10.0	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
Open BSD	3.5	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
Debian GNU/Linux	3.0 stable	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
Gentoo Linux	2004.2	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
Macintosh OS X	10.2.8	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
	10.3.3	Proposed	Looking for maintainer
Solaris	9 (x86 and SPARC)	Proposed	Looking for maintainer

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