[email protected] wrote:
4. There are tools such as foreman (http://theforeman.org/) that integrate inventory management/provisioning with your CM system. Foreman can control DNS and DHCP for you when you add a new host to the system. Foreman doesn't require that you use a CM system, but when you do, there is a single place to record the state each host should be in.
Foreman looks pretty interesting, thanks for the pointer.
6. You mentioned that you like the power of perl+CPAN for application installation. One of the big gains in modern CM systems is the availability of modules or recipes. They provide a bundled set of functionality that you can then use in your CM code similar to the way CPAN modules can be used by various perl applications. A side benefit is that they often provide good documentation on deploying various applications.
Actually, those kind of give me nightmares. It's bad enough when .deb and .rpm packages are out of date, or just plain broken. Now one has to worry about what a recipe does and whether it works properly? I've started to read through various chef recipes, to compare what they do to the more manual ways I've been configuring stuff - there's an awful lot of complexity and dependencies that worry me a lot.
By and large, for most mature software that we install, I've found that the upstream tarballs, install instructions, and makefiles "just work." Editing a config file is simple, and often automatic. Binary packages are more of a crapshoot. Somehow worrying about chef recipes (or whatever) scares the heck out of me.
Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
