I’ve fallen in love with automated server deployments in the last year, with my primary weapon being Salt.
One of the corner cases I’ve run into is adding sysctl settings specific to a feature set. For example, when a server needs Redis installed, I want to add the following kernel optimization via sysctl:
vm.overcommit_memory = 1It’s sloppy to add this to /etc/sysctl.conf – too hard to maintain in a modular fashion. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place we could drop a file with that sysctl setting in it, which would be automatically read on boot? This would enable adding and removing multiple sysctl settings a breeze to automate.
Well, it turns out that RHEL/CentOS does have this support via /etc/sysctl.d. While only RHEL/CentOS 7.x sports the directory out of the box, all three versions provide access to it via init scripts, and anything placed in /etc/sysctl.d will be read on boot, provided that the networking init script’s start action is called (it’s enabled by default).
Unfortunately, this is a bit of an odd placement for triggering a reload of the sysctl settings. I also wanted the ability to only reload the sysctl settings as part of a feature installation on a running server.
The path to get this feature turned out to be pretty short. /etc/init.d/functions contains an apply_sysctl function which handles all the dirty work of completely reloading all sysctl settings, including those placed in /etc/sysctl.d. This extremely short wrapper script does the job:
Armed with that script, I simply use Salt to automatically install it to /usr/local/bin on all servers, and call it any time a file in /etc/sysctl.d is added, removed, or modified.