Marcus Moeller wrote:
> Hi.
>
>>> At that point I pass it over to puppet personally. Used to use
>>> cfengine, but there are aspects I prefer when it comes to puppet; your
>>> mileage may of course vary.
>>
>> well, refer back to my initial email on the subject. Its how you split
>> state and policy - puppet isnt all that great at state management but
>> does a great job of policy management and enforcement for that state.
>>
>> But then again it depends on how you play your setup, and exactly how
>> you define what 'management' really is.
>
> I am personally not that big fan of Puppet, as things are getting quite
> complex in large scenarios and as Puppet does not scale well (this has
> been improved in the latest version if you are using passenger instead
> of webrick).
>
> If you are willed to set up complex configurations with depends and
> variables, Puppet may be a good choice. In addition of Cobbler or
> TheForeman you will get provisioning functionality, too. IMHO you should
> also be familiar with Ruby, too.
>
> Spacewalk is one single tool for all Lifecycle Management task. It is
> capable of bare provisioning (using Cobbler integration),
> re-provisioning (using Koan), configuration management, errata
> generation and package management. It also scales quite well if you are
> using Oracle Standalone instead of XE. With PostgreSQL, a free database
> backend will be integrated in the near future.
>
> We are using Satellite/Spacewalk to manage about 2500 Clients and Servers.
How well do any of these tools work when the hosts are widely distributed or
distributed with groups in different locations? And how do they handle IP
assignment on multiple NICs? Do you need DHCP capability on all segments or do
you need to know all the MAC addresses and the cable connectivity starting out?
Also, do they provide a version-controlled history with a way to easily find
when a change was made and undo it?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com