[clue] CM for a small sysadmin.

[David L. Anselmi]

Chris Fedde wrote:
> I'm always surprised that rdist never comes up in this discussion. That was
> the system we used at the old USWest and I brought it with me several other
> places.   Having spent a year each with cfengine, puppet and ansible I'm
> retuning to rdist at my next opportunity.

You should give a talk on how you used rdist and how it was better than the others. I'd come if it 
wasn't on a Saturday.

I think I used rdist long ago. It pushes files out to remote machines, right?

So the obvious disadvantages of that seems to be that it's reuse by cut and paste and it either 
bypasses your package manager or you build package stuff on top of it. But maybe you have better 
experience than I.

I don't think it would be any worse than what I'm contemplating for bootstrapping, though 
debootstrap already connects that to package management. I'll eventually have to see if there are

One thing I'd like to see, though I don't know whether anyone is doing it, is that machines manage 
themselves. So they get a config and apply it, rather than some other machine making changes to 
them. That may not matter much in practice, and it may not be as available as I hope. But I'm 
guessing rdist doesn't work that way (it didn't when I used it last).

Dave