centralizing network configuration
Paul Lussier
p.lussier at comcast.net
Mon May 28 17:30:38 EDT 2007
"Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
> On 5/27/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
>> Anyway, I'm tempted to come up with a text file that can describe all
>> of these characteristics and generate the requisite config files from
>> them.
>
> I've never used it, but isn't cfengine supposed to be that? It's
> not lightweight (expect maybe in comparison to LDAP), but it does
> claim to be textish.
No, cfengine is more like set of 'Business Logic' rules behind a web
site. Simplisticly, you tell cfengine which files it manages for
which hosts, and cfengine can either push or pull any changes when it
notices them. You can get extremely complex rules set up both on the
cfengine client and server to automagically micro-manage every aspect
of your host configuration.
But cfengine wouldn't really build your DNS/DHCP configurations for
you, rather, it would make sure each host has the correct versions of
things like /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, etc. depending upon where in
the network hierarchy that host lived, which class of machine it
belonged to, which OS it was running etc.
Thought I've never gotten a change to implement it, I've read about it
extensively, and very much welcome the opportunity to play with it
some day (although, I've heard bcfg2 is supposed to be "better"* than
cfengine).
* Better defined as: it comes with it's own difficult-to-learn,
one-off, turing-complete configuration language which is completely
different in every way than cfengine's difficult-to-learn, one-off,
turing-complete configuration language.
--
Seeya,
Paul
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