On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Pat O'Brien <p...@petta-tech.com> wrote: > > We now manage a little under 2000 hosts in three separate data centers with > etch without any issues with scalability, flexibility or manageability > whatsoever.
I spent some time this weekend reading up on etch. The etch-users mailing lists seems to have very little traffic and I have some questions, I hope you don't mind commenting on some or all of them: 1. It seems to (be able to) shell out to do a lot of scripting. Is it possible to use git for the SCM backend instead of RCS? 2. It is client server architecture, which is very cool. Any suggestions as which distro works really well as an etch server? We use CentOS exclusively here so would like to stay within it, however, if this system can be as useful as it appears on the surface, I'd be willing to deal with a different distro for one machine. 3. Any "cut and paste" or "quick script" suggestions for quick client installation on CentOS 4.x and 5.x servers? The wiki introduction had a lot of commands that manipulated files outside of the package management system, so I wanted to see if there was something more within the confines of rpm. (On Ubuntu, I was able to install some things via aptitude, but overall things wanted more recent versions so I had to use gems to install just about everything ruby related, at least for the server part). > We use etch in conjuction with nventory > (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nventory/) and life is 1,000 times more > easier now than it was when we were using puppet. Another ruby app, eh? This perl programmer faces a a real learning curve in order to do basic things like upgrade it. I have not yet delved deeply into it, but will look into this also. 4. Is my understanding correct that I could do something as simple on the etch server as a local DB file all the way up to a backend like mysql/postgres? I think I'm going to setup a VM as an etch server and see what happens when I try to configure it. I was hoping for a simple mode where I could just modify a config file on a server and etch would automatically see it and yank it into the config repository and just push that file out (if commanded to), but it seems to not be aimed in that direction. -- Regards... Todd Real Integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that no body's going to know whether you did it or not. _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
