On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:39:58AM -0500, Paul Robert Marino wrote:
> The only problem I ever had with cfengine is the documentation was
> never all that great but it is stable and scales well.
> That being said puppet is not perfect many of the stock recipes for it
> you find on the web don't scale well and to get it to scale you really
> need to be a ruby programer. My other issue with puppet is it doesn't
> provide you with a great amount of control over the timing of the
> deployment of changes unless you go to significant lengths.
> Essentially its good for a "Agile development model" environment which
> is popular with many web companies; however its a nightmare for
> mission critical 24x7x365 environments which require changes to be
> scheduled in advance.

At the risk of continuing off-topic for the list... but it's a really
interesting discussion... We ended up building a bunch of infrastructure
around cfengine to help with this kind of thing. First step was getting
the cfengine config into version control (svn, then git), which seems
basic now, but I certainly wasn't doing that 10 years ago! Then one of
our smart student sysadmins devised a way we could make development
branches of the config, and tell specific machines which branch cfengine
should use. That's been very useful for figuring out more complicated
actions like setting up OSG nodes.

Of course once you build this kind of infrastructure and have it
working, you're reluctant to abandon it. Maybe there are tools which
do all this for you now, that's why this is such a good thread.

> These days I'm using Spacewalk for most of what I would have used
> cfengine or puppet for in the past the only thing that it doesn't do
> out of the box is make sure that particular services are running or
> not running at boot, but there are a myriad of other simple ways to do
> that which require very little work, and if I really wanted to I could
> get spacewalk to do that as well via the soap APIs.

Yes, spacewalk seems like it can do a lot (some of our neighbors here
use it). We still have a somewhat multiplatform environment - SL,
FreeBSD, a few lingering legacy systems still hanging on (tru64), so
more generic tools are still important to us.

Graham
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Graham Allan - I.T. Manager
School of Physics and Astronomy - University of Minnesota
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