[TriLUG] Configuration management

[James Olin Oden]

On 9/5/07, Shawn Hood <shawnlhood at gmail.com> wrote:
> Figured I'd ping the list and get some advice.  I'm working at a
> company that running around 30-40 local and colo'd servers.  Some of
> these machines are jboss servers, build servers, web servers, etc.
>
> While I used cfengine some time ago, I was wondering what has
> developed in the past while.  What are you guys using, and what kind
> of experiences have you had with these packages?
>
> Shawn
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Our approach is probably only good for an evironment where your
selling systems as part of a solutions to your customers, and you have
really tight controls over the sold systems.  Anyway, what we do is
essentially:

   - package all of our configuration changes into rpms.
   - Use a home grown config/source control tool called RCSTool to locally
     check and check out config files when we make changes.
   - Not allow other rpms than the ones on our linux distro on the box.

The last is achieved by making our upgrades essentially do a
convergence algorithm whereby we make the rpm database on the system
have exactly the same set of headers as are on our media.  This means
if its not on the media, its gone.

Anyway, you can imagine this does not work well in a less rigid
environment (though the first two could options are feasable, probably
something like cfengine combined with source control (if it doesn't
already do that) would be more viable).

Cheers...james