On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 01:47:07PM -0700, Jordan Brown (Sun) wrote:
> Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> > The difference between you and me is that you think in terms of "the box",
> > whereas I think in terms of "the computing environment", which is managed
> > as a unified whole, not as a collection of separate individually-managed
> > boxes. My way scales; your way requires me to touch every box. "If I have
> > to touch it, it doesn't scale".
>
> Yes, but following that line of thought a few steps further, a
> commonized configuration and service management infrastructure lends
> itself to being plugged into larger-scale management frameworks,
> including multi-system management tools.
>
> It would be (relatively) easy to layer a multi-system management tool
> that could tweak any parameter or enable or disable any service on top
> of SMF. It would be quite difficult to do that with a traditional
> administration model.
>
> for i in `cat hosts`
> do
> scp myfile ${i}:/etc/myfile
> done
>
> is simple but it's a really crummy model for multi-system management.
> Heaven help you if you need to update only a single parameter in that file.
Here's an idea: port the SMF configuration repository to Linux and use
it to generate config files there. This + a network protocol for the
configuration repository (with decent security options, of course) might
go a long way to making SMF gain traction. I'm tossing this over the
wall; I expect groans and "no way"s :)
