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
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
services, rather than tftp-server and Apache. I suspect that will cause
some rather painful scaling issues. Also there is no virtualization
solution, and in present times, being able to support virtualization at
the same level of physical systems is critical. Twisted has always
struck me as a rather experimental "wouldn't it be cool if" kind of
library, but not something I would consider for production server building.
Ultimately, I wish them luck, and open source allows for choice. If
people like it they will use it, but the real power in OSS development
is in communities, feedback, and design. I am really proud of the
community we have here and I expect that if there is something we're
lacking you'll tell us (and maybe even help us build it). So, if there
is something you like about sysdirector that we /don't/ do, or other
tools integrating some of our favored tools don't exist, tell us what it
is, and we'll try to make it better.
--Michael
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