[CentOS] Spacewalk or Puppet?

Wed Nov 4 19:46:46 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

nate wrote:
> 
>> But will the tool do these changes for me?
> 
> The tool will do anything you tell it to, it's a generic tool.

OK, but if I have to write the script, why wouldn't I just write the 
script my way and automate it over ssh which already works instead of 
learning some new language and having to install some new agent 
everywhere to run it?

> You could define a class that runs a script to detect the network
> settings, if it is forced to full duplex it would return true, which
> would then trigger another command to run or config files to get
> copied, if configs are copied after that it could execute another
> command(perhaps snmpset to change the switch config or something).

It's next to impossible to get or set a duplex setting via snmp. And 
non-trivial to figure out what switch port is connected to what device - 
OpenNMS does a reasonable job but if you activate all of its checks it 
can kill things that have full bgp routes.

>> 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.
> 
> Yeah the biggest issue I have with images is hardware types, if
> all your boxes are the same then it can be ok, but if you have
> varying types of hardware it could get messy of course..

It's messy any way you look at it.  We have a few different types of 
hardware and have to spend some time tuning the base install for new 
ones but that's something manageable.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com