[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

[Les Mikesell]

nate wrote:

>> Most of our machines have 5 or so NICs, each connected to special
>> purpose subnets.  And even the ones that only need 1 or 2 connections
>> will have the same physical setup so the servers are reusable.
> 
> Trunk all the ports and use VLANs ?

This might be possible now - it wasn't when the infrastructure was built 
and it still seems like a bad idea to throw 60Mb+ multicast feeds onto 
the same physical interface with anything else.

>> Of course, but that's the point.  If you've had old Cisco switches that
>> didn't auto negotiate well, you'll have all of the connected equipment
>> set to force full duplex.  Then when you replace the switch you have to
>> undo that - probably one subnet at a time.  How do you manage real-world
>> things like that with a configuration tool?
> 
> Set the new switches to be forced full duplex too and go in and
> fix the systems with a script or by hand, or just rebuild them
> (very few of my systems have data on their local drives that is
> valuable, everything is stored or transferred to centralized storage)

But will the tool do these changes for me?

> You wouldn't believe the lengthy list of commands needed to build
> a system from the ground up before I re-wrote everything so it is
> automated.

Sure, but after doing one right, clonezilla can give you a thousand just 
like it without caring how it got that way.  I agree it's ugly, but it 
also doesn't depend those underlying commands being repeatable or the OS 
that they ran on.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com