[nycbug-talk] New Setup Questions

[Brad Schonhorst]

On May 27, 2009, at 7:42 PM, mark.saad at ymail.com wrote:

> Hello talk
>  Some what related to this , has anyone used radmind to keep  
> configuration files and apps in sync across mutuple servers . I am  
> now working somewhere where radmind is king and I have never touched  
> it .
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>



Mark-
I setup Radmind to manage the integrity of a medium sized LAN (75-90  
OS X boxes) and it worked extremely well.  Had scripts to reimage a  
machine nightly or when an admin logged in with a specific account.   
Setup was a bit of a challenge with some userland apps but for config  
files it should be no problem.

Email me offline if you have specific questions.

-brad

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org>
>
> Date: Wed, 27 May 2009 13:34:19
> To: Matt Juszczak<matt at atopia.net>
> Cc: <talk at lists.nycbug.org>
> Subject: Re: [nycbug-talk] New Setup Questions
>
>
>
> On 27-May-09, at 12:59 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Two more questions for everyone.
>>
>> Just an update a month later - we've been working hard on the
>> migration
>> project, but we're coming down to the wire.
>>
>> I've gotten everything setup nicely - internal DNS, everything uses
>> LDAP,
>> I'm using package distribution (via NFS) with custom FreeBSD  
>> packages,
>> everything is in sync and config'd the same, tuned, etc.
>>
>> The two things I haven't been able to complete that I wanted to are:
>>
>>    - A good dev environment
>>    - using puppet
>>
>> At this point, I need to find a temporary solution for us to keep our
>> webserver configuration and code in sync.  For now, I was thinking  
>> of:
>>
>> - configuring puppet on the webs so that /usr/local/etc/apache22 is
>> managed 100% by puppet (since its 100% identical across all
>> webservers).
>> The other option would just be to temporarily make this directory an
>> svn
>> checkout, but ... eh....
>>
>> - putting all of our code in an SVN repository (temporarily) and
>> checking
>> it out to all the webs.  Somehow, I would need to tell the webs when
>> it's
>> ok to run "svn update" and on which directory to do that.  I could
>> do that
>> with a script, or I could do it via puppet potentially?
>>
>> I haven't had much time to play with puppet, and we only have a few
>> more
>> days.  Can someone with puppet experience let me know if the  
>> temporary
>> solution I propose above is an ok idea, or if it would be better to  
>> go
>> another route?
>
> my general rule of thumb is that having all of your configuration data
> stored in puppet/cfengine/etc is a good thing for sure.  I would not
> suggest having all of your servers depend upon svn to keep their
> configs in sync.
>
> now, having all of your puppet configs in svn is probably a good thing
> - and setting up some post commit triggers in svn could even be done.
> for example:
> - all of /usr/local/apache/ is managed via puppetd on client side, and
> all configs are in svn on the puppet server side
> - admin updates $PUPPET_HOME/modules/apache2/some-config-file and
> checks it into svn
> - you have a svn hook (or call back) that pushes this new config to
> puppet and automatically gets pushed to your web servers.
>
> i'd have a hard think about the last part though as if used improperly
> you can really shot yourself in the foot :)
>
> regarding puppet configuration schema it's pretty straight forward.
> something like this may work...
>
> define all of your httpd systems somewhere like $PUPPET_HOME/ 
> manifests/
> httpd.pp
>
> node my_server {
> # common configs for all servers in production
>        include generic-server-config
> # snmpd config files
>        include snmpd
> # apache configs
>        include apache2
> }
>
> then create a httpd config class (i think puppet uses the term
> "module").  here is one we use which may help:
>
> $ find $PUPPET_HOME/modules/apache2/
> apache2/
> apache2/manifests
> apache2/manifests/init.pp
> apache2/files
> apache2/files/apache-testfile
> $ cat apach2/manifests/init.pp
> class apache2 {
>
>         package {
>                 apache2: ensure => installed
>         }
>
>         file { "/etc/apache2/testfile":
>                 source => "puppet://$servername/apache2/apache-
> testfile"
>         }
>
> }
>
>
> in this example we just have a dummy apache test file, you could
> obviously have your httpd.conf, sites-enabled/site-config and such in
> there.  you also may, or may not want the package{} statement.
>
>
> HTH
> -pete
>
>
> ps -> i'm relatively new to puppet (coming from cfengine), so if any
> puppet guru's out there some obvious mistakes don't hesitate to let me
> know!
>
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