Current best practices for system configuration management?
For a while now, I've been using `equivs-build` for maintaining a
hierarchy of metapackages to control what is installed on my various
machines. Generally, I can do `apt install mrc-$(hostname -s)` and
I'm golden.
Now, I would like to expand that into also setting up various config
files that I currently do manually, for example, the `/etc/apt/*`
configs I need to make the above work. For a single set of files,
manual isn't bad, but as I want to get into setting up LDAP, autofs,
and so on, it is time to explore solutions. I only have four systems
at the moment (two physical and two virtual), so I don't think I need
something too fancy.
My first thought was to simply add a `Files:` section to *.control
files I use for my metapackages. After all, for configs going into
*.d directories, they are usually easy to just drop in and remove, no
editing in place required. But, that is when I discovered that all
files under `/etc` are treated specially.
I've found a lot of documentation out there, but, of course, much of
it is out of date. https://wiki.debian.org/ConfigPackages , for
example, seems to recommend slightly old to really old tools. Tools
like `ansible`, `puppet` and so on seem, at first blush, aimed at
larger installations than mine. But maybe other's experience with
them will show they scale down fine?
Anyway, suggestions based upon actually experience would be appreciated.
Cheers,
mrc
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