[nycbug-talk] enterprise bsd

[Paul Dlug]

On Mar 9, 2005, at 10:49 PM, Bjorn Nelson wrote:

> This sounds like what I was looking for.  Do you have any tips for 
> using this?  I was thinking about just having this to update freebsd 
> core and some etc files and then use portupgrade to update added 
> programs from ports.  Do you know of any good resources for this?  
> Exclude list repositories?


The original paper has some good information in it:

http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa03/tech/craig.html

The presentations on radmind.org contain alot of good information as 
well. Alot of it is very Mac OS X specific but the general concepts are 
the same for all platforms.

I think you'll quickly discover that it makes sense to manage as much 
as possible. There's a temptation to put large sections in the 
"negative space" like /etc or /usr/local until you hit an application 
that modifies so many files you can't locate them on your own. If you 
take the approach of managing everything you can guarantee that hosts 
are equivalent to each other.

The other trick is to logically separate the loadsets so that each one 
stands on it's own and can be shared. I tend to create a loadset for 
each logical grouping of packages (xorg + dependencies or postgresql by 
itself).

If you have any other questions let me know, it can be hard to get 
started but once you're used to it it's a very very powerful tool and 
you can do some neat tricks (like setting up dozens of servers in a few 
minutes, duplicating a host for testing, instant DR, etc.).

--Paul