[Gllug] Production system - Linux 2.4.24, LVM and cciss

[Rickey Costas]

John Hearns wrote:

>>cfengine looks prety funky, but also like one of those things thats a 
>>solution looking for a real problem ! 
> 
> I don't agree.
> There are many smart people looking into methods of automatically 
> configuring and managing large, heterogenous arrays of machines.
> The one I'm more familiar with is LCFG http://www.lcfg.org
> The LHC grid project at CERN is evolving an XML based schema to describe
> the configuration of machines.


I dont doubt there are smart people looking at the problem. It is a 
dificult problem, so having smart people looking at the problem is a 
good thing.

It does however sound like that class of problems where if the solution 
is general enough to take into account all possible input, it becomes as 
complicated managaging the configuaration system as it is managing all 
the configs. Most of the time it will be easier generalising a config, 
and coping with a smaller set of different systems. However, I'm sure 
there are (rare) times where it is justified having to learn a new 
language to store machine configs.


>> Maybe I should have a better look at it in all the spare time 
>>I've got caused by all my machines being the same :-)
> 
> Well then you are lucky.

I was being sarcastic, hence the smiley.

> There are other institutes and industries out there which have a big mix
> of machines. Even though they're Linux, they may do different jobs,
> such as compute servers, dedicated build machines, login hosts, web 
> servers...  

I dont doubt that. But there are classes of machine, and its usually 
easier to generalise a class of machine so that the number of different 
classes is manageable.

> That's where things like lcfg and cfengine come in.

Couldnt agree more. When it gets too complicated, gets something like 
those packages in. I'm just trying to think of a setup in which just 200 
machines require such specific setup that one of those config management 
setups is justified (to me).


Rickey.


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