[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

Fri Sep 17 19:52:59 UTC 2010
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Kwan Lowe wrote:

> 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

I've keyed configuration repositories to HOSTNAME before (and still do 
for very small installations), but over the long haul I've found 
the service-keyed repository more to my liking. In particular, 
cfengine makes it easy to work that way:

   /etc/motd -> /r/systems/motd/motd.HOSTNAME
   /etc/openldap/slapd.conf -> /r/services/openldap/slapd.conf.HOSTNAME

One benefit of this method is that you can have a single file that 
works for a whole class of machines, e.g.,

   /etc/syslog.conf -> /r/services/syslog/syslog.conf.client-linux

where "client" becomes "server" for syslog servers and "linux" 
becomes "macosx" or "sunos" depending on the platform.

As I said, however, a lot of that arrangement is a function of the way 
that cfengine works. I'd probably do it differently if I were using a 
different tool.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/