[CentOS] cfengine vs. puppet

[Les Mikesell]

On 8/27/2010 9:57 AM, James Hogarth wrote:
> On 27 August 2010 14:41,<m.roth at 5-cent.us>  wrote:
>> Stefano Sasso wrote:
>>> 2010/8/27 Ski Dawg<centos at skidawg.org>:
>>>> After spending a little bit of time searching around today, I have run
>>>> across 2 that seem like good options, cfengine and puppet.
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone have any thoughts about either of these tools? Is there
>>>> definite advantage to using one over the other from your experience?
>>>> Is there a another tool that I should be evaluating?
>>>
>>> have a look at
>>> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7841
>>>
>>> my 2 cents
>>
>> Here's another two cents: first part of last year, I was working with
>> Spacewalk, the released version of RedHat's satellite. While I was
>> fighting it tooth and nail, it went from 0.4 to 0.5. With that experience,
>> I'd say *don't* bother about it....
>>
>>        mark "user hostile"
>>
>
> Basing your comments on a version 0.4/0.5 that is pretty unfair.
>
> It is now 1.1 and the user mailing list is active for assistance.
>
> I maintain nearly 100 servers that are a mix of virtualised guests,
> kvm hosts, production systems, dev/qa systems and so on with various
> different profiles.
>
> It has made my admin life much easier keep track of what updates are
> due for what and deploying both software and files - or running script
> son groups of systems.
>
> The only provisos I would put in place right now are that it requires
> an oracle database at this time and only use it if you are only
> looking after Redhat based systems... RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, etc ...
> Solaris support is there but it doesn't have a huge following to help
> troubleshoot and Debian support is still on its way.

cfengine has a bit more cross-platform capability, but note that CentOS 
supplies a 2.x release where the project has moved on to 3.x with wildly 
different syntax, and a native windows build is only available in the 
commercial version.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com