On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote: > I know the OP asked for "cool" things to do, but I'll add my vote to > those who suggested highlighting configuration management. I'm not > sure how much puppet or cfengine you teach in a half-day, but I'm > fairly confident you could cover: Yes! If there's anything I wish were taught to new system administrators, it's that your configuration is your code. > > 1. considering configuration files to be code -- it needs to be in > a repository > > 2. setting up a Subversion or git repository and some possible ways > of laying out a configuration repository (per host, per service, > etc) > > 3. committing changes, recovering older configs when newer ones > introduce regressions > My general method is to keep a CVS committed directory somewhere on the root filesystem with all configurations. Then I symlink the tracked files back to that repository. For example: /etc/hosts --> /configs/HOSTNAME/etc/hosts /etc/syslog.conf --> /configs/HOSTNAME/etc/syslog.conf Restoring a machine's "identity" is just a simple matter of checking out that host's configuration directory then running a script to create the symlink.s > Personally, I like Subversion for configuration repositories because > (imo) sysadmins usually like having an authoritative repo rather than > a widely branched one -- but git is on the rise and is certainly worth > considering. > > > Other, slightly related, suggestions include setting up a > documentation wiki and/or a ticketing system. Trac can do both, but > there are plenty of worthwhile alternatives. > > -- > Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/ > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >