Thanks, Michael. Looks like my mistake: in trawling through the wiki, I
had overlooked the section in "Built in configuration management" which
is titled "Keeping Things Updated". That addresses my terminological
timescale question, and the implementation question (via koan, which I
had previously thought, from its man page, was purely for installation).
Thanks.
-- David Lee
Michael DeHaan wrote:
No, there's no reason to limit it, nor any reason to assume the status
quo must hold.
There's nothing saying koan can't gain more support for more idempotent
configuration runs and couldn't be put on a crontab. This is probably
an area where it will only grow. Most of the complexity in
configuration management tools is not needed when the packages do most
of the work. What's left is mostly around blasting out templates, and
if you need a more complex system, it can integrate with those. Is
Cobbler just a provisioning app when it also does repo mirroring and
updates, and can reboot your machines for you? Not really.
I actually like what's been added to Cobbler to support better
files/package integration a good amount. Incredibly lightweight, super
simple, and doesn't require you to learn a programming language. Plus
I really like that you can use the same templates for kickstart that you
use post-kickstart.
Now imagine using Func or another tool to trigger koan runs, and you
have a full system. (But we'll leave choosing that up to you, crontab
would be fine).
Writing a configuration management system into Cobbler (well, Func) was
always something I wanted to do, it was always not organizationally
compatible.
To be clear, I have no interest in competing with full-on management
stacks -- there's nothing to win -- but for people who still want to
manage their systems simply without learning a modeling language I think
we can do that very very well.
And, in accordance with Cobbler philosophy, we'll not force you to go
either way.
Configuration is largely about files. We help you manage those things
at runtime. Nothing wrong with using the word.
Many folks who are pushing out hosted apps with different deployment
models (even Capistrano, etc), just don't need something that heavy.
--Michael
On Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:57 AM, David Lee wrote:
Michael DeHaan wrote:
Thanks, totally agree.
[...]
Thanks. Glad to that, as a newbie to cobbler, I'm getting this
more-or-less right.
[...]
Then there are a few things that probably don't have pages on them,
where we could take them off the main page too.
* power management
* PXE (boot loop prevention, menu generation, etc)
* configuration management (section exists already about puppet, but
should merge in the built-in config stuff and make easier to understand)
[...]
I've always been uneasy about the way cobbler talks about "configuration
management".
Installed machines can have a life-cycle of several years. It is in
this long-term, ongoing maintenance context that products such as
cfengine and puppet use the term "configuration management".
But when cobbler documentation uses this same term, it isn't talking
about long-term maintenance at all. Rather it is talking about
"configuration initialisation": getting some sort of initial
configuration onto the machine that will probably do for the moment,
where "for the moment" means "while my mind is on the business of
getting this machine started; probably less than a day; probably less
than an hour; probably less than even 15 minutes".
So I would suggest that we give care to our use of terminology and
intention. I suggest we reserve the term "configuration management" for
its generally understood long-term maintenance purpose (cfengine,
puppet, etc.), and introduce a term such as "configuration
initialisation" to discuss our activities of doing the initial
tailoring. This initial tailoring might include hooks to install
cfengine/puppet and just enough to get them started; it might include
the material (hitherto called "config management", such as "management
classes" etc.).
-- David Lee
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: David Lee
: ECMWF (Data Handling System)
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