On 9/27/06, Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Steve Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> What methods / utility's are others using to keep machines configuration
> files current?
There are about as many different methods as there are sites. Stanford is
currently in the process of deploying Puppet for that purpose.
<http://www.reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/>
Previously, we mostly used bundle plus shell scripts:
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/bundle/>
but that's intentionally a more manually-driven process rather than a
fully automated one.
Many other people use cfengine; we're deploying Puppet in preference
because the core seems more robust and the syntax easier to use.
Another option is bcfg2 - http://www.bcfg2.org - it has the advantage
of having a very nice reporting system, so if you are in an
environment where for example you want to have proof that security
patches have been installed for management, it's a big win.
Puppet, cfengine, and bcfg2 seem to be the "big 3" of Free/Open Source
Configuration Management systems, at least according to frequency of
appearances in ;Login: and at LISA. All 3 have significant deployments
outside of the groups of the people who wrote them.
The choice between tools also comes down to some degree to what
languages you are comfortable with:
* Bcfg2 uses XML (most of which can be autogenerated for you with
scripts) and Cheetah (The Python-Powered Template Engine), and if you
want to write custom plugins or hack on the code, that's all Python.
* Cfengine uses a custom scripting language, and the code is in C
* Puppet uses a custom scripting language that is similar to /
attempts to improve upon the custom scripting language in cfengine,
and the code is in Ruby
* I'm unfamiliar with bundle
If you are interested in Configuration Management, a better list to
talk about this stuff in would probably be the Config-mgmt list, which
you can sign up for at
http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/config-mgmt
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