Re: conf management for many debian boxes

[Donald <kndonlee@gmail.com>]

>  Puppet is the "new" one, and is nicer in many respects, but
>  there aren't packages for Sarge at least - so that might be a
>  dealbreaker.

> Common place, and sometime with other distributions, and even, other Unix, and
> why not Windows server...

I'll definitely have to look into cfengine and puppet.  I took a quick
gander, and it doesn't look quite like what I had in mind as far as
workflow goes, but it looks like the goals are very similar to what
I'm looking for.

I've had in mind for some time to get the Sarge machines upgraded to
etch, but since there are some production apps that have been running
for years and they aren't the typical LAMP stack or I haven't
necessarily gotten around to upgrading and testing for etch, but it's
enough.

Thanks,

Donald

On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 6:02 PM, Steve Kemp <skx@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sun Jun 08, 2008 at 11:55:17 +0200, Gilles Mocellin wrote:
>
>> At first, I'd recommend you to look at puppet or cfengine.
>
>  Seconded.
>
>  There is a brief introduction to this here:
>
>    http://www.debian-administration.org/tag/cfengine
>
>  I use it at home on 3 machines (10+ xen guests) and at work for
>  150+ machines.  It scales nicely, can copy configuration files across
>  and handle package installation, configuration, and removal.
>
>  Puppet is the "new" one, and is nicer in many respects, but
>  there aren't packages for Sarge at least - so that might be a
>  dealbreaker.
>
>  (It wasn't around when I started using CFengine; now if I had to
>  choose for Etch+ systems I'd probably go with puppet, but at the
>  same time the implementation is mostly irrelevant.  It comes down
>  to knowing what you want to achieve - and no tool is going to
>  make that too easy...)
>
>> You always need to think, else, bad things always find a way to happen !
>
>  Indeed.  I've not done it yet, but I do have a vague fear that
>  if I don't test things adequately I'll ruin the configuration
>  of 150+ machines - might take only a minute or two to fix each
>  one, but the thought of having to login to each host and do manual
>  fixups fills me with fear ;)
>
> Steve
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