On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Todd Lyons <tly...@ivenue.com> wrote:
> 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? > We use svn for ours so I wouldn't be able to say for sure but I can't imagine why git wouldn't work. > 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. > We use CentOS at work for practically everything, including our etch servers. For the etch-client (living on hosts) there should be rpm spec files already made for ease of deployment which we just have installed, along with other things, during the post section of our kickstart files. As for the server, we don't roll it out using a package manager, so the instructions on the wiki would be the best bet to follow. > 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). > Client or Server? The Client should be rather easy as it depends on ruby, facter, rcs, crontabs, all of which can be pulled automatically via a yum install. As for the Server itself, unless you were to roll your own rpms for the gems, you would be stuck with using gems. I don't really have a problem with this, personally. > > > 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? > We have mysql providing the backend db for the etch server. I see no reason why something like sqlite wouldn't work. > > 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. > So you would want to have a "gold" server, where you would edit say, /etc/sysctl.conf, etch would see the change submit it to svn or git and then push that "gold" /etc/sysctl.conf file out to all of the hosts you permit it to? I've never tried that but I wouldn't imagine that behavior exists in etch. If I misunderstood the question, let me know. Hope this helped. > -- > 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 >
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