On Thursday 21 July 2011 18:36:17 Devin Reade wrote:
--On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 11:02:42 PM -0700 RC cooleyr@gmail.com
wrote:
On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:07:06 -0600 Devin Reade gdr@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