[CentOS] about major version upgrades

[Craig White]

On Feb 7, 2012, at 12:38 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 1:11 PM, Craig White <craig.white at ttiltd.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> If it is possible to abstract the differences, perhaps you aren't
>>> using all the new features and didn't have to upgrade after all...
>> ----
>> I suppose that if you believe that, then you are suffering from a lack of imagination. I can deploy LDAP authentication setups to either Ubuntu or CentOS with the various pam, nss, padl files which are vastly different in no time.
> 
> How well does it handle windows?
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I haven't tried but I gather that at this stage, only a subset of features are working on Windows at this point. It does seem that they are committed to the platform though and have been adding features with each release.
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> 
>> I'm only expressing the notion that it is entirely possible to get beyond the paradigm of locked in server installs on iron that takes a lot of effort to maintain (ie, update/upgrade X number_of_servers). There are some very sophisticated configuration management system, chef looked good, I chose to go with puppet and I've been very pleased with the depth and scope of puppet.
> 
> I'm actually very interested in this, but puppet did not look like the
> right architecture.   http://saltstack.org/ might not be quite ready
> for prime time but it looks like a very reasonable design.  The python
> dependencies are probably going going to be painful for cross platform
> installs but at least someone on its mail list has it working on
> windows and there are already epel packages.
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a different type of management system. Puppet & Chef are simply about configuration management.

Puppet architecture is pretty awesome - but the puppet master itself can't be a stock CentOS 5.x system because ruby 1.8.5 is too ancient. I suppose you can use Karanbir's ruby-1.8.7 packages (or better yet, enterprise ruby packages) if you insist on running the server on CentOS 5.x. The thing about puppet is that the barrier to entry is rather high - it takes some time before you get to something useful whereas Chef is more adept at putting other people's recipes into service fairly quickly. Then again, you will run into barriers with Chef that don't exist with puppet so it seemed that the ramp up investment had long term benefits.

Craig