> In the RH 5.2 Cookbook section 11.4.3 explains maintaining package > repositories for system service. I know this is probably a large topic with > many ways of maintaining systems but I am curious if this method is used out > in the real world. If not what, what is a common method? As you can tell > from the question you have a newbie on your hands. Thanks Matt
We use a similar method for managing both service and configuration files -- not exactly the same, but inspired by it. To be blunt, there's no other good answer if you need to be able to produce machine-auditable systems. The auditors we deal with seem to be leaning strongly toward the "if it doesn't show up in rpm -qa, it's not there" school of thought, and once you learn how to create your own RPMs, you'll tend to use the technique of packaging configurations into RPMs just as quickly. We use three local repositories (the base from the distribution vendor, a "role-based" repository, and a customization repository that is server instance specific and has configuration files for applications on that server that are maintained in a source control system). Config files are checked out, modified, checked back in, and a makefile sets up the RPM environment, checks out a whole application configuration, makes a new RPM, puts it in the configuration repository, and does createrepo for it. Deployment is then as easy as 'yum update'. In general, doing anything outside the maintenance system is going to bite you unless you do better docs than most of us. Having a local repository inside the machine cuts WAY down on network traffic and speeds up installs by an amazing amount -- if we build a system from scratch using the external repositories, it usually takes about an hour or so. Building from the internal repository over a VSWitch takes a little over a minute. Yes, it costs you some disk space, but it makes life WAY easier. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
