[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

[Karanbir Singh]

On 11/04/2009 06:49 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> I personally think that cloning is for people who dont know what they
>> are doing.
> Of course - that's a feature, though, not a bug. You want the people who
> bolt the machines in the racks to be able to do it - and you don't want
> it to dictate to you what OS they can install.

Not sure what kind of a setup you have in mind - most, if not all, the 
people I know running their own management services tend to need and use 
little other than remote hands for moving stuff around or pressing very 
specific buttons. Across the board, most DC's in the UK and the few that 
I haved worked with in the US as well, tend to prefer tech support to 
come from the services organisation - which in this case should be / 
would be you - and not the Data Centre guys - their main role is to 
manage electrics/temperature and in quite a lot of cases, the network.

> OK, just as soon as one exists that works across platforms for people
> who don't know what they are doing.

If they dont know what they are doing - start by firing the guy who 
hired them. He (or she) is clearly incompetent in his own role.

>> how do you mean 'changes' ?
>
> I'd like to have the whole /etc tree handled more or less like rancid
> does for cisco configs

Were not really living in the 1980's anymore.. things have moved on a 
bit in terms of both mindset and capabilities of tools around systems 
management :) And there is also a lot of policy and role management that 
happens outside /etc that is well worth managing too.

> It is always an emergency except for things like content on the web
> servers (which mostly gets there via rsync over ssh with underlying
> versioning).

You clearly need better management if all you are doing is fighting 
fires and causing emergencies all the time!

> Just dreaming here, but I think this stuff really belongs in something
> like Hudson

Completely disagree. Hudson is a depoyment tool that wraps app and build 
to release code. Systems management using tooling like that is not only 
a waste of time, is also adding layers of complexity that only add to 
the instability of the whole stack.

On the flip side, hudson could be managed to some extent using your 
state management tool - like spacewalk - which could then manage code 
rollout and build-> test -> release cycles.


-- 
Karanbir Singh
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