[clue] CM for a small sysadmin.

[Chris Fedde]

Pull vs push is always one of those important arguments that leans heavily
on a teams political organization and coupling between server roles.

Much "site wide" stuff and even per node stuff can be factored off the
local box and into shared network resources like LDAP, DNS, NFS, and the
like.
With total control of the nodes the need for per-system customization via a
CM tool is minimized.  Much of the time a good network boot script and a
'dpkg --get-selections' file can go a long way to getting the server
complex up and running and properly customized with the right bits.  System
drift can be corrected by rebuilding it.

With this kind of organization then there are typically only a few files or
services that you might want to manage directly on nodes.   A very simple
CM system will meet that need.

chris


On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 12:53 PM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us>
wrote:

> 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
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