Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs
On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 10:34 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote: On Sat, 20 Oct 2012, Drew Northup wrote: On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:57 AM, da...@lang.hm wrote: On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote: da...@lang.hm writes: today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and again when the top-level stuff is created. if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical gold-master configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep the machine specific tweaks In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't the config to be pushed out to the boxes, it's instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools. So you need to save what is there before pulling changes from the master. That's no different from doing development work on an active code base. David, Is there any particular reason you aren't using etckeeper? not really, I've thought of that as a tool for managing a single system. Some of the data in configs is sensitive (and much of it is not in /etc), but I guess I should be able to work around those issues. .gitignore and symlinks have been employed at times to deal with that. How can I sanely organize all these different, but similar sets of files on the central server? The reason I asked about etckeeper is that you could, with proper security in place, push those up to branches in a shared repository (set up using gitolite, for instance) and not loose information about the files in the process. This would allow you to make your changes on one system using vi or whatever else is convenient, push the change up to the shared repo, cherry-pick it into the other branches (using a full check-out of all of the branches someplace safe as a workspace), and pull that change out to the other systems. If you are just looking to gather configuration information in the large and don't want to engage in any shared management schemes (which may involve symlinks in seemingly odd places to /etc and such) you may wish to look at the System Configuration Collector [1] [2] which is a nicely organized tool designed specifically to gather just the important (and not highly confidential) information about common software on a server and present it (and changes to it) to the admin in a sensible manner. It is outside of the Git Universe but it does what it sounds like you are doing now (if not what you wish to be doing). (1) http://www.qnh.eu/scc/ (2) http://sourceforge.net/projects/sysconfcollect/ -- -Drew Northup -- As opposed to vegetable or mineral error? -John Pescatore, SANS NewsBites Vol. 12 Num. 59 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe git in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs
On Sun, 21 Oct 2012, Drew Northup wrote: On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 10:34 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote: On Sat, 20 Oct 2012, Drew Northup wrote: On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:57 AM, da...@lang.hm wrote: On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote: da...@lang.hm writes: today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and again when the top-level stuff is created. if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical gold-master configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep the machine specific tweaks In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't the config to be pushed out to the boxes, it's instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools. So you need to save what is there before pulling changes from the master. That's no different from doing development work on an active code base. I think I've done a poor job of explaining my problem. I'm not looking for tips on how to manage the systems themselves, I'm looking for suggestions on how to manage this data that I'm already gathering on this reporting server. I have the problem that different departments have their own (different) preferred tools for implementing changes. There are 6 different departments that need to be involved with a single system to build and maintain it. Each department has their 'standard' way of doing things. At least two of these departments are using different, central configuration (i.e. puppet like) tools. As a result, I am not looking to pull changes from the central location. I'm just trying to gather information and be able to produce reports about the systems (Including This is what all the different configs files on this server were like at time X). I'm not using the distributed features of git at this time. I've got existing tools that do a very similar job to what it sounds like sysconfcollect does that gather the non-sensitive info from all my remote machines and sends the data to my central server. These tools send an update whenever 'significant' changes are made, and in addition do a scheduled update to catch less significant changes. On my central server I have the directory configs-current that then has a subdirectory details/systemname for each system that contains all the information about htat system (populated by scripts that parse apart the data mentioned above) In other files and directories in configs-current I have lots of more global data and reports. This includes things like a report of every interface on every machine, the IP address, does it have link, what speed is it at, etc. Right now I have one git tree for configs-current and each time I update a details/systemname tree I do git add -a configs-current/details/$systemname git commit -m'system update from $servername' then when I run the summary scripts I do git add -a configs-current git commit -m'summary update' This has been working for a few years However, trying to go back in history to find a change on one system is a pain. Right now the updates accumulate until I manually trigger a processing cycle to update the files. I would like to make it so that the updates to each system's details/systemname directory is done automatically as the e-mail from that system arrives, and this could result in parallel updates. I don't think that git will handle this well in one tree with the existing process (different processes doing git add and git commits in parallel will end up mixing their data) As one big tree, this has lots of commits (a couple hundred each update), and this is making it slow to try and track changes to a particular file in a particular system. I'm thinking that splitting the history tracking per-server should make everything faster. I'm wondering if I should do a subproject for each details/systemname directory, or if there is something else I can do to make this tracking of the data better. Doing a single repository with lots of branches doesn't seem like it would work as I need to get at the data from all the branches at the same time. I guess I could do something with branches on one repository, with a different worktree for each system, but that seems a bit fragile (one command with the wrong environment variables and it coudl really tangle things up) David Lang -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe git in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs
On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:57 AM, da...@lang.hm wrote: On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote: da...@lang.hm writes: I've got a directory tree that holds config data for all my servers. This consists of one directory per server (which is updated periodically from what is currently configured on that server), plus higher level summary reports and similar information. today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and again when the top-level stuff is created. It is quite clear to me what you are keeping at the top-level files, but if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical gold-master configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep the machine specific tweaks as differences from the canonical stuff, instead of having N subdirectories (one per machine). In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't the config to be pushed out to the boxes (i.e. what they should be), it's instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools. The systems are all built with a standard image, but the automation tools I do have tend to push identical files out to many of the systems (or files identical except for a couple of lines) David, Is there any particular reason you aren't using etckeeper? -- -Drew Northup -- As opposed to vegetable or mineral error? -John Pescatore, SANS NewsBites Vol. 12 Num. 59 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe git in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs
On Sat, 20 Oct 2012, Drew Northup wrote: On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:57 AM, da...@lang.hm wrote: On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote: da...@lang.hm writes: I've got a directory tree that holds config data for all my servers. This consists of one directory per server (which is updated periodically from what is currently configured on that server), plus higher level summary reports and similar information. today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and again when the top-level stuff is created. It is quite clear to me what you are keeping at the top-level files, but if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical gold-master configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep the machine specific tweaks as differences from the canonical stuff, instead of having N subdirectories (one per machine). In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't the config to be pushed out to the boxes (i.e. what they should be), it's instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools. The systems are all built with a standard image, but the automation tools I do have tend to push identical files out to many of the systems (or files identical except for a couple of lines) David, Is there any particular reason you aren't using etckeeper? not really, I've thought of that as a tool for managing a single system. Some of the data in configs is sensitive (and much of it is not in /etc), but I guess I should be able to work around those issues. I can e-mail 'patches' to the central server, but I'm then back to the same question that I started out with. How can I sanely organize all these different, but similar sets of files on the central server? David Lang -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe git in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs
da...@lang.hm writes: I've got a directory tree that holds config data for all my servers. This consists of one directory per server (which is updated periodically from what is currently configured on that server), plus higher level summary reports and similar information. today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and again when the top-level stuff is created. It is quite clear to me what you are keeping at the top-level files, but if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical gold-master configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep the machine specific tweaks as differences from the canonical stuff, instead of having N subdirectories (one per machine). -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe git in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs
On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote: da...@lang.hm writes: I've got a directory tree that holds config data for all my servers. This consists of one directory per server (which is updated periodically from what is currently configured on that server), plus higher level summary reports and similar information. today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and again when the top-level stuff is created. It is quite clear to me what you are keeping at the top-level files, but if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical gold-master configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep the machine specific tweaks as differences from the canonical stuff, instead of having N subdirectories (one per machine). In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't the config to be pushed out to the boxes (i.e. what they should be), it's instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools. The systems are all built with a standard image, but the automation tools I do have tend to push identical files out to many of the systems (or files identical except for a couple of lines) David Lang -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe git in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
