[clug] Distributed Administration

[Peter Barker]

On Fri, 25 Sep 2009, Andrew Janke wrote:

> There are mechanisms within FAI in which you can do a "softupdate" so

I too used FAI for many years to manage several small clusters of 
machines.  It is very cool once you get it running, but is a lot of work 
to set up - or was....

> Both of these tools have a bit of a learning curve (especially the
> rather complex self-healing setup of cfengine2), but I can provide
> example configs to those who might like it.   If only an example
> cfagent.conf file.

In particular, when they moved from cfengine1 to cfengine2, a whole lot of 
my scripts started spewing something akin to "change does not converge" - 
IIRC, your scripts had to be idempotent...

Still, it was very cool to be able to issue, "reinstall <machinename>"; 
ssh <machinename> reboot" and knowing what you'd get when the machine came 
up.  Handy when you're on a different contintent to the data centre, but 
even more handy at 3am in the morning in a cold, uncomfortable data 
centre.

> a

Yours,
-- 
Peter Barker                          |   Programmer,Sysadmin,Geek.
pbarker at barker.dropbear.id.au	      |   You need a bigger hammer.
:: It's a hack! Expect underscores! - Nigel Williams