On 10/24/07, Derek Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Barry Roberts wrote: > > On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 16:11 -0600, Mike Lovell wrote: > >> I have a question about software for managing LOTS of machines in a > >> datacenter. > > > there's another product called Cobbler. It's a redhat product so I don't > know if your debian stuff will work with it. > > http://cobbler.et.redhat.com/ >
Cobbler essentially wraps kickstart, PXE, DHCP, managing distro trees and such all together in one package (though I think it's targeted toward RH-style distros like Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS). Haven't used cobbler myself, but looks pretty nice. I believe FAI (mentioned in a previous post) is integrated with cfengine, so that combo may work well for you. We use cfengine where I work, and while it has its warts, it is quite powerful and useful (that power can be good and bad...it's not hard to b0rk your entire cluster real quickly :-). It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over the initial hump, you can automate just about anything with it. But if you're just starting down this path, I'd recommend puppet (http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/) instead of cfengine. It's still somewhat new, but is seeing more and more uptake. It was written by a guy who used cfengine for a number of years and got fed up with it. It's written in Ruby and has a nice OS abstraction layer, such that (for example) you can say, I need package foo installed on these machines, and puppet will figure out for you how to install that package (apt on Debian, yum on Fedora, whatever equivalent exists on MacOS, etc), so you don't have to worry too much about OS-specific details. bcfg is another such tool, but I don't know too much about it. -- Dan /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
