managing applications

[Tom Buskey]

On Jan 7, 2008 4:31 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:

> OK, another unix operations theory question:
>
>   What's the best way to maintain installs of applications?


RPM, DEB, Solaris packages.  Know the app & it's configuration files.  Then
you can reinstall from a kickstart/jumpstart.

Thoughts:
>   This would be easier if there were /etc/sysconfig/iptables.d/mysql
> and /etc/sysctl.d/mysql.conf, but there aren't (yet).


Yep, you need to copy the config files & that varies by app with no real
standards in sight.  I've seen /etc, /etc/opt, /etc/sfw, /opt/etc,
/usr/local/etc, /opt/sfw/etc.


>
>   The RPM database (could be deb, doesn't matter) knows about many
> of these files.
>   Sun has favored /opt, but that's a bit of an admission of defeat,
> at least from an LSB perspective.


And it works just as well in the Solaris world as the Linux world.  One
thing that many Solaris (and other older unixen) did was have an NFS
/usr/local.  Now that did isn't $4/MB, having it managed with packages on
local disk make more sense.

  A tree of symlinks into /opt might be a compromise.
>   Some kind of runtime patching (e.g. sysctl.conf-patch-mysql) might
> be appropriate.
>
> Magic-wand:
>   There's some tool (which understands pipes, of course) that will
> gather up the important bits of my install and put them in an archive.
>

How elaborate do you need to be?  cfengine and similar.....


>
> I'm unlikely to be the first person to have thought about this, but
> if it was fixed 10 years ago I missed the memo.  Any thoughts?
>

As long as people have their own ideas about where to put configs, this will
be unfixed.  /etc is a good starting point at least :-/
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