[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

[Les Mikesell]

Karanbir Singh wrote:
>
>  >  And how do they handle IP
>> assignment on multiple NICs?  Do you need DHCP capability on all segments or do
>> you need to know all the MAC addresses and the cable connectivity starting out?
> 
> You only need that for the initial provisioning setup, once the machine 
> is running - neither of the tools need any info on network stacks ( but 
> you are welcome to plumb in whatever you need / want ).

What good is a configuration tool if it can't handle a change in NIC 
setup?  That's really about the only thing that is enough trouble to do 
manually that it is worth more automation than a shell loop of ssh commands.

 > DHCP isnt ideal
> when setup in smaller clusters over a widely spread out, geographically, 
> setup .

Exactly - and remote 'hands on' support generally won't know which NIC 
is which, making this fairly problematic.  And you can't just clone 
setups because the copies won't work with different MAC addresses.

>> Also, do they provide a version-controlled history with a way to easily find
>> when a change was made and undo it?
> 
> You dont really need that with platform / state - but its a must for 
> policy and role control - All the major tools in that space encourage 
> use of a VCS backed with layered ACL's if need : puppet/cfengine/chef/bcfg2

I'm not sure I agree with that.  I really do want to know about 
platform/state history even if I can't roll it back.  For example, if 
someone changes the duplex setting on a NIC to match a switch I'd like 
to have the change recorded - and a way to look at how that machine is 
different from both the way it was at some other time and from other 
similar machines.

Also, we almost never roll out a change across all machines in a group 
at the same time but instead closely schedule individual machines or 
small sets.  Do any of the tools make this easy?  That's the main reason 
I haven't used OCSinventory's deployment mechanism even though its 
cross-platform capabilities are appealing in a mixed environment.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com