[nycbug-talk] New Setup Questions

[Brian Gupta]

Matt,

I'm gonna talk about puppet since that's what I know. With puppet, since you
are running a centralized configuration management system, you can keep your
config files in puppet.

Puppet understands a number of resources types. These include:
- Files
- Users
- Packages
- Services
- Cron
- sshkeys

and many more.. See here for a relatively full list:
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/TypeReference

In addition.. Puppet can exec arbitrary code in the event that what you need
to do is not yet supported.

Puppet let's you structure nodes and classes in an object hierarchy. Very
cool when work with related machine types.

I'm curious how you found puppet limited? (Particularly as compared to your
SVN proposal).

Thanks,
Brian

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 11:01 PM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:

> That's what I'm trying to figure out.  These two questions sort of
> intertwine themselves.  If we decide to go the "ports scripted" route, we'll
> most likely have scripts like this in SVN:
>
> ./webserver-setup.sh -h<option1> -i<option2>
>
> which will basically do a cvsup /etc/ports-supfile, install necessary ports
> (all the same version of course), install php, etc.  Then, we'd push the
> configuration files via svn as well.
>
> If we decide to go a package route, we might even put the packages in SVN,
> so that you can "check out" the repository of packages.
>
> I've looked at puppet, and I've looked at CF engine: puppet seems limited,
> and CF Engine seems complex.  Seems like it's a pick your poison.
>
>
> On Fri, 17 Apr 2009, Brian Gupta wrote:
>
>  Not to start up the cfengine vs puppet debate again, but one question. How
>> do you plan to handle package installation?
>> That's one thing where CMS can really help.
>>
>> -Brian
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>>      We're launching an entirely new setup across FreeBSD boxes - about 50
>>      servers total.  I have two things which I'm still somewhat debating,
>> and
>>      thought I'd get a second opinion.
>>
>>      First, instead of using CFEngine to manage the boxes, I was thinking
>> of
>>      using an SVN-based setup.  Each server would checkout their
>> appropriate
>>      files via SVN, and I would "trigger" each server when it needs an
>> update
>>      via config files that would be fetched often via either ftp or svn.
>>  This
>>      is neat and flexible, but not as complex as CFEngine.  Thoughts?
>>
>>      Second, I'm trying to decide how to do packages.  Across the 50
>> servers
>>      we'll have about 6 or 7 different hardware sets.  Some will be Dell,
>> some
>>      IBM, etc.  Most will be 64 bit boxes (to address larger memory
>> ranges).
>>      Should I set up a single server for each class (and do make package
>> to
>>      create packages for each box), or should I just compile ports from
>> source
>>      on each box, verifying that I'm installing the same package version
>> each
>>      time (which will allow each box to take advantage of the benefits of
>> its
>>      specific hardware).
>>
>>      Those are my two questions, and I'd appreciate any input anyone can
>>      provide.  Thanks!
>>
>>      -Matt
>>      _______________________________________________
>>      talk mailing list
>>      talk at lists.nycbug.org
>>      http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> - Brian Gupta
>>
>> New York City user groups calendar:
>> http://nyc.brandorr.com/
>>
>>
>>


-- 
- Brian Gupta

New York City user groups calendar:
http://nyc.brandorr.com/
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