Re: Current best practices for system configuration management?
Mike Castle wrote:
> 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 it is out of date.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.
Chef or Puppet are good, but probably not worth the bother for
4-5 systems. Definitely worthwhile for 10+ systems, and scalable
to thousands. https://cinc.sh is producing a fully open release
of Chef (with the new name, Cinc is not chef). I use Chef at
work.
The easy end of single-machine is etckeeper, which just checks
your /etc (and whatever else you specify) into a local git. The
high end of single machine is Nix, which has a complete language
designed to capture the complete configuration of a system (and
has spawned NixOS, a complete distribution).
The easy end of multi-machine systems is cdist and itamae. You might be
quite happy with those, and itamae is reputedly very Chef-like.
-dsr-
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