asset management tools?

[Neil Schelly]

On Wednesday 01 March 2006 08:53 am, Paul Lussier wrote:
> It started out as a means to track hard drive temperature over time.
> But since we needed to have all systems and all drives in all systems
> in the database, we decided to make it a general asset management
> system.  From there we decided to add tables to manage users.  From
> the database, once we get the scripts written, we're planning on
> generating:
>
>   - /etc/netgroup
>   - /etc/sudoers
>   - /etc/ssh/ssh_host_keys
>   - DNS zone files
>   - LDIF for an LDAP server
>   - ~<special user>/.ssh/authorized_keys(2)
>   - a (dynamic) web based phone/pager contact list

Have you ever looked into cfengine for these kinds of tasks?  I've heard that 
it's very flexible for this sort of detailed remote management, but that it 
can be a bit of a pain to get setup.

For that matter, has anyone here used cfengine before?  I've been considering 
trying to play with it on my own and seeing how it can make our production 
environment a little happier.

> I'd love to see the list of things you care about.  Feel free to mail
> me privately if you don't want to discuss this on list.
Well, due to some rather bad development practices here, it's important to 
know the date that a particular installation of our software was built on, 
because development doesn't really have branches or tags in CVS or milestone 
releases or anything.  Instead, whatever is committed into CVS when the 
installation tarball is built is what gets installed.  I know it makes no 
sense and I'd love to change it (as would the developers for that matter), 
but management seems to think it's not worth the investment of time to learn 
how to do things right.  Other than that, specific hardware peripherals, 
firmware revisions, ram types and sizes, slots for more, hard disks, 
brand/model/submodel, OS and version, role within our production 
infrastructure, peers in terms of clustering, wishlist if it's approaching a 
limit of its hardware, date of purchase, number of Us...

That's what I come up with off the top of my head and most of that can be kept 
track of so long as I can customize the attributes it stores.
-Neil