[nycbug-talk] cfengine book

[pete]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 16:55:52 -0400, "Jesse Callaway" <bonsaime at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 12:44 PM, pete <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 11:45:35 -0400, thomas at zaph.org wrote:
>>> For those of you that want to follow up on Steve's presentation from
>>> yesterday, I recommend the cfengine book(let) from the Usenix/SAGE
>>> short-topics series:
>>>
>>>     http://www.sage.org/pubs/16_cfengine/
>>>
>>> If you're a SAGE member, you can view the book as a PDF for free, or
> you
>>> can purchase the booklet for $15 (non-members).
>>>
>>> It's written by the author of cfengine (Mark Burgess) and Aeleen Frisch
>>> (she wrote the O'Reilly sysadmin book).
>>>
>>
>> That's a great pamphlet from Usenix!  I also am a fan of "Automating
> Unix
>> and Linux Administraton" by Kirk Bauer (A! Press).  Covers some basics
>> regarding cfengine, and there are some other useful hints in there too.
>> Probably a good addition to your sysadmin team room for the junior guys.
>>
>> -pete
>>
> 
> ... like me ; )
> 
> thanks for the suggestion. My takeaway from last night's meeting was
> that cfengine is entirely inappropriate for use where I work... too
> diverse of a base of computers. Too bad!
> 

really?  i think that's a pretty good asset of cfengine - we use the
windows, OSX, solaris, freebsd and linux clients.  true - some of the
features are not super helpful for windows, but i think it works out pretty
well.  i like how you can use cfengine to act as a pseudo tripewire/mtree
for files like /etc/sudoers,passwd,group, our how you can build in tmpwatch
type checks into your environment too.


> I've got to just stick with RCS and rsync. Why not SVN? Less typing,
> which makes me more apt to use it.

yea totally, we had used rdist for ages on our linux and irix machines
which basically can achieve the same thing.  svn would be fun, you could
still have your centralized repo and still get versioning w/o having to
throw rsync into the mix.  although all these schemes suffer from a pull
only system - which may or may not be ok for some folks site.  for us, we
decided that being able to push out changes from a master server, while
also pulling changes every 15 mins gave us the flexibility we need.

anywho...wish i could have made the meeting...where there any people
pushing puppet :)

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
310.869.9459