Hi, Just stumbled across this and was wondering if the RH/Fedora folk have come across this and whether or not it fits up with Spacewalk, Cobbler, Func., etc. http://www.sysdirector.org/ Cheers, Harry
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 07:44:30AM -0400, Harry Hoffman wrote: > Hi, > > Just stumbled across this and was wondering if the RH/Fedora folk have > come across this and whether or not it fits up with Spacewalk, Cobbler, > Func., etc. > > http://www.sysdirector.org/ "SysDirector is a template driven configuration management system that allows administrators to deliver content to machines in a protocol independent fashion." This is really solving the wrong problem. You really don't want to be working in terms of configuration file templates. You want to work based off functional configuration requirements, and have the tool itself decide what the actual config file settings need to be. This is the core benefit of using Puppet over cfengine. Combine puppet with Augeas, and you make it really easy to modify config file settings in-place without using templates. Daniel -- -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|
Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 07:44:30AM -0400, Harry Hoffman wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> Just stumbled across this and was wondering if the RH/Fedora folk have >> come across this and whether or not it fits up with Spacewalk, Cobbler, >> Func., etc. >> >> http://www.sysdirector.org/ >> > > "SysDirector is a template driven configuration management system that > allows administrators to deliver content to machines in a protocol > independent fashion." > > This is really solving the wrong problem. You really don't want to be > working in terms of configuration file templates. You want to work > based off functional configuration requirements, and have the tool > itself decide what the actual config file settings need to be. This is > the core benefit of using Puppet over cfengine. Combine puppet with > Augeas, and you make it really easy to modify config file settings > in-place without using templates. > > Daniel > I talked with one of the authors for a while on IRC last week, just to understand what they were trying to do, since typically Cobbler+puppet (or cfengine for some) is the way /most/ of the people here manage their(Continue reading)
Ah, I think I misunderstood the purpose of sysdirector. I envisioned being able to template puppet/cfengine config files much in the same way that we do now for kickstart, snippets, etc. Daniel spoke about it solving the wrong problem. I'm not sure I disagree with him but currently I think the vast majority of people who use some sort of configuration mgmt system wind up templating their files. I guess I need to look a bit more at Augeas. Cheers, Harry Michael DeHaan wrote: <snip> >> > > I talked with one of the authors for a while on IRC last week, just to > understand what they were trying to do, since typically Cobbler+puppet > (or cfengine for some) is the way /most/ of the people here manage their > systems. (That, and it seems nagios+cacti for monitoring/trending). > > Sysdirector is apparently glue for puppet/cfengine+their homegrown PXE > provisioning. They had heard of Cobbler but had not looked at it. > > My main concern is that it uses Twisted to provide TFTP and HTTP(Continue reading)
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 11:28:33AM -0400, Harry Hoffman wrote: > Ah, > > I think I misunderstood the purpose of sysdirector. > > I envisioned being able to template puppet/cfengine config files much in > the same way that we do now for kickstart, snippets, etc. > > Daniel spoke about it solving the wrong problem. I'm not sure I disagree > with him but currently I think the vast majority of people who use some > sort of configuration mgmt system wind up templating their files. I don't debate that - certainly today nearly everyone uses some kind of config file templates - primarily because there has never been a good quality tool like Augeas before to let them do a better jobDaniel -- -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -
o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|
Harry Hoffman wrote: > Ah, > > I think I misunderstood the purpose of sysdirector. > > I envisioned being able to template puppet/cfengine config files much > in the same way that we do now for kickstart, snippets, etc. I think templating puppet recipes would be a bit too "meta". I think that is what the Puppet "class" system is for, right? To save what you did once to make it reusable? So in that way I think they already have that. --Michael
Michael DeHaan wrote: > Harry Hoffman wrote: >> Ah, >> >> I think I misunderstood the purpose of sysdirector. >> >> I envisioned being able to template puppet/cfengine config files much >> in the same way that we do now for kickstart, snippets, etc. > > I think templating puppet recipes would be a bit too "meta". I > think that is what the Puppet "class" system is for, right? To save > what you did once to make it reusable? So in that way I think they > already have that. > > --Michael Perhaps you were talking about templating configurations on the managed systems instead, in which case that makes sense, and apologies if I got that confused :) --Michael
On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 14:03 -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote: > I think templating puppet recipes would be a bit too "meta". I think > that is what the Puppet "class" system is for, right? To save what you > did once to make it reusable? So in that way I think they already have > that. Yeah, generating puppet manifests from templates quickly turns into insanity. The puppet language should have enough features to make that unnecessary. If some part of a manifest do need to be generated dynamically, the recommended way for that is to use export/collect in the puppet manifest and write those dynamic resources directly to the database puppet uses to back export/collect. But legitimate uses for that are far and few between. David
On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 11:28 -0400, Harry Hoffman wrote: > I envisioned being able to template puppet/cfengine config files much in > the same way that we do now for kickstart, snippets, etc. If you need to generate config files from templates (and I think we all agree that sometimes it's a necessary evail, but always evil), puppet has builtin support for that, using Erb, ruby's templating engine. And as others have said, Augeas is a much more preferrable way to manipulate config files ;) David
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