[nycbug-talk] USENIX Guru Session on SysAdministration

[Okan Demirmen]

On Thu 2004.07.01 at 22:36 -0400, Rick Aliwalas wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Jesse Callaway wrote:
> 
> > for REAL, I'm all over CVS for server management. Sounds like CVS could 
> > be used for a lot of cloney stuff.
> 
> CVS is used for version control for larger projects.  For sysadmins, RCS 
> works fine for keeping track of changes to config files.  It's extremely
> simple to use and makes reverting back to non-hosed versions of a
> config file a breeze.  It allows you to go back to any previous
> version of a file or just look at what changes have been made and
> by whom.

yea, CVS is great for this type of stuff. but remember that CVS has
a few cluges, such as try bring in an existing /etc directory under
CVS control on a running box. if you control the build process,
then yes, populating those CVS control files by default works in,
say, jumpstart/jass or any of the other build environment. otherwise,
it can be a pain.

i've implemented solutions around CVS, such as using CVS on a central
server then rdist(8)/rsync the config files (push vs pull) - this
method seems to be how cfengine started out. if one manages a
significant number of machines, one expects automate from somewhere
else - and a controlled environment is assumed ;)

it's funny how things come full circle. "back in the day" we used
to have full systems that did all this, from automated builds,
monitoring, change control, blah blah blah, but somehow the "desktop
way" became prevelant and the de-centralization began...and now we
want it back - and other things come full circle in this industry
- just watch data center hardware... i most certainly can not say
i have the authority to say this, but i believe the cheapo x86
hardware is partly to blame.

at one point, i took OpenBSD's daily/weekly/monthly/security scripts
and made them work on all our sunos/solaris/linux/*BSD/(and yes,
windows to a small extent) environments and that helped....more
work was required to make it great, but i've since moved out of the
isp business.

okan

> By "cloney" do you mean keeping config files between multiple machines in
> sync?  rsync is great for that.
> 
> -rick
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-- 
Okan Demirmen <okan at demirmen.com>
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