[OpenAFS] package tool

[Daniel Clark]

On 9/27/06, Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Steve Devine <sdevine@msu.edu> writes:
> > What methods / utility's are others using to keep machines configuration
> > files current?
>
> There are about as many different methods as there are sites.  Stanford is
> currently in the process of deploying Puppet for that purpose.
>
>    <http://www.reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/>
>
> Previously, we mostly used bundle plus shell scripts:
>
>    <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/bundle/>
>
> but that's intentionally a more manually-driven process rather than a
> fully automated one.
>
> Many other people use cfengine; we're deploying Puppet in preference
> because the core seems more robust and the syntax easier to use.

Another option is bcfg2 - http://www.bcfg2.org - it has the advantage
of having a very nice reporting system, so if you are in an
environment where for example you want to have proof that security
patches have been installed for management, it's a big win.

Puppet, cfengine, and bcfg2 seem to be the "big 3" of Free/Open Source
Configuration Management systems, at least according to frequency of
appearances in ;Login: and at LISA. All 3 have significant deployments
outside of the groups of the people who wrote them.

The choice between tools also comes down to some degree to what
languages you are comfortable with:

* Bcfg2 uses XML (most of which can be autogenerated for you with
scripts) and Cheetah (The Python-Powered Template Engine), and if you
want to write custom plugins or hack on the code, that's all Python.

* Cfengine uses a custom scripting language, and the code is in C

* Puppet uses a custom scripting language that is similar to /
attempts to improve upon the custom scripting language in cfengine,
and the code is in Ruby

* I'm unfamiliar with bundle

If you are interested in Configuration Management, a better list to
talk about this stuff in would probably be the Config-mgmt list, which
you can sign up for at
http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/config-mgmt