Seth Vidal wrote:
If the goal is to save time by not having to research and avoid a
whole bunch of stuff you really don't need to know about to duplicate
a known working and recommended setup (and I'd think a lot of people
might have that goal), setting up puppet/cfengine, etc. seems like
exactly the wrong approach. With them, you not only need to know
exactly the configuration you want ahead of time but also yet-another
programming language unlike any other to make it happen. What we need
instead is a package manager to do it for us, given a working example
to pull the setup from.
What you end up with is needing to tie your pkg mgmt system into your
config mgmt system - which is true - you do need to do that- and have
all of them driven from one place.
I'm talking about something very different - a "pull" model that doesn't quite
exist yet. I don't mean cloning servers within an organization. If I'm doing
that I'll just get identical hardware, image copy the disks, and not worry much
about the OS or package manager since the bits all copy the same and any other
way will lock me into an OS I may not want next week.
Besides that, what I think the world needs is the ability for anyone who sets up
a machine for a particular purpose to publish its package list and anyone else
with no organizational relationship and little administrative experience should
be able to select that and get a functionally identical setup. And if they can
track the updates exactly, so much the better. The difference from a centrally
controlled system would be that any number of configurations could be published
and the end user would pick the one with the functionality he wants for a
particular target machine. That way people who need one or a few machines
wouldn't have to learn to be an expert system administrator aware of thousands
of package choices - they could just select an expertly maintained model with
the functionality they want and duplicate it. Something like this could at
least replace the 'respin' versions that grow up around distributions and at
best eliminate most of the work in building and maintaining very specialized
systems.
You are right that a bit of local configuration management is currently missing
to make this 100% automatic, but it's the sort of thing computers should be able
to do for us.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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