What is DIT Managed Linux?

DIT Managed Linux is a managed enterprise environment developed and used at the University of Maryland. Like Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Management (MECM) or JAMF for Apple device configuration management, the DIT Managed Linux environment provides configuration management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ubuntu (currently in its pilot phase).  DIT Managed Linux is comprised of commercial and open-source software, scripts, account management, and processes. This implementation provides several advantages:

• Consistency: Every DIT Managed Linux machine shares a baseline configuration. This ensures hosts look and behave in a standardized and consistent fashion no matter the use case.
• Centralized Administration: The DIT Managed Linux environment makes it possible so that clusters of hosts in various configurations can be maintained at scale, from a few hosts to hundreds. Hosts are maintained via Red Hat Satellite/Canonical Landscape (lifecycle administration/provisioning) and Puppet (configuration management), providing an easy-to-use and robust interface to manage hosts.
• Distributed Control: While DIT Managed Linux is centrally administered, individual campus departmental system administrators maintain control over their systems, including root access.
• Security: DIT Managed Linux heavily uses Kerberos and SSL for security, and its centralized administration means that patches can quickly be evaluated and installed everywhere.

Top

Where can I find more information about DIT Managed Linux?

For additional details about DIT Managed Linux, why it benefits you, provisioning a Glue Root Account, the technology behind the services, etc., Please review the Departmental Linux Support Confluence pages.  The latest information will be maintained there, and this IT Support article links to it.

Top

What version of Linux does DIT support?

DIT currently provides support for the following operating systems:

What RHEL Linux support can DIT offer?

DIT provides support for unmanaged, managed, and partially managed Linux systems. 

Unmanaged Servers

If DIT Managed Linux systems do not meet your needs, we can provide licensing and updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems by downloading the ISO and using these instructions. These systems receive package updates and licensing from our Red Hat Satellite system.  No support is provided for these systems beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing and package update availability.  DIT won't install patches or provide desired state configuration (DSC) in this unmanaged collection.

Managed Servers

DIT supports Linux systems per the roles and responsibilities discussed in this article. DIT manages the infrastructure, ensuring its availability, regular updates, security, implementation of new features, Red Hat patch deployments, etc.

DIT Managed Linux systems can be provisioned on your physical hardware or virtualization cluster, or you can use DIT's AWS Virtual Server Hosting (VSH) service. AWS VSH instances are customer-owned but are provisioned by DIT on AWS infrastructure.  Aside from the initial provisioning of the systems, roles and responsibilities for VSH systems are the same as any other DIT Managed Linux system.

License renewals

• DIT renews the Enterprise Red Hat campus subscription yearly.  Individuals and departments can use this to license the Red Hat OS and Satellite subscriptions at no additional cost.
• DIT renews several campus software licenses hosted on departmental and DIT-owned machines such as ArcGIS, AutoDesk, Mathematica, and SPSS.

Top

Roles and Responsibilities

Customer/Department Administrator

• Management of the guest operating system, including OS installation and reboots to apply OS patches
• Management of customer application software or utilities (including updates and security patches)
• Management of data backup and recovery
• Identity and Access Management - User Access
• Management of customer-owned physical hardware (including support contracts)

DIT

• Deploy updates and security patches for the guest operating system
• Management of "campus-wide" application software or utilities (including licensing, updates, and security patches)
• Identity and Access Management - System Admin and Root Access
• Management of access to endpoints to store and retrieve data (including networking and storage)

What can't DIT support?

• Teach basic Linux skills
• Day-to-day system administration support
• Install specific software packages only used by your group
• Create custom scripts (programming)
• Hardware recommendations
• Hardware installations and repairs

Top

Personal Websites

DIT recommends hosting files such as a class syllabus in Canvas or using one of the following solutions to host a website - Choosing a Web Hosting Service

DIT Managed Linux offers a pub directory to host a personal website.  However, there are no plans to improve that offering, and it may be retired at some point in the future.  Pages may be accessed by directly accessing glue.umd.edu/~username or terpconnect.umd.edu/~username in the browser.  There is no index of all these pages.  To reiterate, please use other website hosting methods, as they will most likely be retired at some point in the future.

Top