[CentOS] managing a rack full of centos servers

[RC]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:07:06 -0600
Devin Reade <gdr at gno.org> wrote:

> You get one master xterm, a bunch of slave xterms, and you can either
> type in the master to affect all nodes or selectively type in the
> slaves.

Yes, but I don't want a bunch of XTerms.  I can slide my phone open,
ssh in and manage my cluster using pdsh.  And I've written plenty of
serious scripts using pdsh/pdcp, which obviously wouldn't work with
XTerms popping up.

> It should be considered as complementing the automated config
> management tools like cfengine et al, not as a replacement for
> them (they're doing different jobs).  

That's not entirely fair.  A little shell scripting and pdsh and pdcp
can certainly do everything cfengine/puppet can do, and obviously more
that they can't.  Some of it may be a bit more clumsy this way, though
it has other advantages like being "atomic" so to speak, and not
lumbering around, slowly putting things in-sync.

I don't want to sound like a zealot by any means.  It's got plenty of
marks against it.  But it most definitely works, in some very demanding
circumstances, and it still hasn't become a problem, even as we keep
asking it to do ever-more.