[CentOS] managing a rack full of centos servers

Thu Jul 21 22:19:29 UTC 2011
Marian Marinov <mm at yuhu.biz>

On Thursday 21 July 2011 18:36:17 Devin Reade wrote:
> --On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 11:02:42 PM -0700 RC <cooleyr at gmail.com>
> 
> wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:07:06 -0600 Devin Reade <gdr at gno.org> wrote:
> >> It should be considered as complementing the automated config
> >> management tools like cfengine et al, not as a replacement for
> >> them (they're doing different jobs).
> > 
> > That's not entirely fair.  A little shell scripting and pdsh and pdcp
> > can certainly do everything cfengine/puppet can do
> 
> I wasn't referring to pdsh/pdcp; I was referring to pconsole.  The
> reason I said complementing is that sometimes it is good to have
> stuff under a configuration management system like cfengine/puppet,
> but sometimes you need to run ad-hoc commands, in an identical
> fashion, on lots of similar machines, which pconsole is good at
> (subject to the caveats I previously mentioned).
> 
> I made no comments on pdsh/pdcp at all, and make no claims on where
> it fits in the spectrum.
> 
> Devin
> 
You can actually achieve the same functionality of pdsh/pdcp and pconsole with 
a quite simple bash script :)

  http://multy-command.sourceforge.net/

I think it is a matter of what the admin will prefer to do. When you have a 
lot of identical machines, sometimes it is better to have cfengine/puppet, but 
sometimes it just an overkill to use them if you are the only one 
administrating those machines.

cfengine and puppet have a very good place on machines that are administered 
by a team of people. 

But solutions like pdsh/pconsole and multy-command, in my opinion are more 
suitable when there are only one or two guys administering those machines. 


Marian
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