On 04/05/2010 23:42, Matt Lawrence wrote: > I have a rant about old time Solaris admins constantly wanting to do > things the hard way that I will not post here, so lets just say these > folks have probably never even heard of using version control related to > systems administration.
(that's more than a broad generalisation! You've only got to run 'what' on a Solaris system binary to see that the Sun ecosystem has been doing revision control for years!) Another alternative approach is to do everything through installable, versioned, packages. If developers are already reaping the benefits of revision control, and deployment by package, why shouldn't systems admins? (A package can still consist of files and postinstall scripts.) It has the further benefit of allowing easy, controlled release to UAT environments before production. It comes down to the scale of what you are managing. If you've got 10s, 100s of identical/near-identical systems then a package approach can work well. Also, if you've got Red Hat's Satellite server, then its configuration channels are useful (and, could be considered as a "vendor supported" way of doing things, that any other sysadmin you employ might have reasonably encountered before - CFengine, Puppet, Chef, etc. can be a harder sell), as is its package deployment and inventory facilities. James. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
