[CentOS] Configuration Management Redux (was: best parallel / cluster SSH)

[Kwan Lowe]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 2:03 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> But, if someone ever gets cross-platform config management right or at
>> least close enough that it is worth learning yet another description
>> language I'd be very interested.  Cfengine v3 might be getting there but
>> the windows version seems to be only available in the commercial build.
>
> OK, this is the perfect sequay for me :-)
>
> Assuming you only want Linux, and at that CentOS Linux - which are
> both the case for me - what Config Management system would you use?
> What is out there?

I'm using a mix of puppet, CVS, tentakel and a mix of custom scripts
to manage about  30 instances in my environment.  In brief:

LDAP with 389Project (RedHat DS) for authentication
CVS on the cental admin server to maintain puppet configurations,
kickstarts, etc..
Puppet and custom scripts to generate and to push configurations
Nagios to monitor and alert
Central config server running Samba, vsftpd, dhcpd, etc to rapidly
deploy an instance

I made a decision to manage all configurations at the central admin
server (CAS) which is backed up and redundant. This means that if a
node goes down, I can redeploy it within a matter of minutes with an
identical configuration. For example, when my DNS server went down
because of hardware, all I did was recreate a VMware partition, point
it to a kickstart, then wait.  After it was completed the newly built
system checked in to the CAS, pulled down its configuration, then
started serving DNS requests again.