On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Jesse Becker <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Yves Dorfsman <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 2012-10-03 16:16, Howard Bampton wrote:
>>> All my NIS maps were historically under RCS (periodically purged by
>>> hand), with a secondary repository of daily snaps kept in a second
>>> spot for disaster recovery/"how long has this defect been out there"
>>> purposes. I'll probably do something similar to the second style for
>>> my LDAP stuff some day (hard to tell when a field changed/got
>>> added/whatever).
>>>
>>
>> The sad part is that you consider this unorthodox.
>> RCS, mercurial, git, etc... are so cheap to use that there is absolutely no
>> reason not to use them for NIS, DNS, ldif files etc... I mean unless you
>> hire those type of admins who never ever make even a single mistake.
>>
>> Personally I think any machine that needs any tweaking after a rebuild
>> should have /etc under VC.
>>
>
> To take it a step further:  any machine should have its configuration
> management  tool rules/promises/recipes under VC.  Nothing on the
> machine should be modified directly.

I've worked with people that did one or more of the following:
* hadn't goofed up badly enough that the "pain" of using some form of
backups of such files was less painful than redoing something from
memory/seat of the pants
* had goofed up, but used comments in various files to track changes
(nearly impossible to find the live content after a while and knowing
when the changes were made is problematic)
* used brute force and saved entire copies by wrapping "vi" (horribly
wasteful of space at a time when disks were in the <10 GB range and
large files change dozens of times a day)- history files got wiped
after a month or two as a result, but part of the lesson was learned.
* manually made backup copies with random naming schemes (for the same
file on the same host- hosts.YYYYMMDD, hosts.save, hosts.old,
hosts.older, holds.$username.<something>, ...)
* knew I did something on the sly for select things, and came to me
when things broke
* hadn't done so...yet.

I can't say any of the people I have worked with or know personally
have ever done something to manage OS configs on an ongoing basis via
chef/puppet/other-free-alternative/$$$$ome-commercial-product/something
homebrewed. The closest I've seen was a solid Jumpstart setup and a
nearly as good Kickstart one.

Clearly such shops exist, just not at the handful of larger employers
(or subsets of their infrastructure) I know about first or second
hand.
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