Greetings everyone. I have a question about everyone's favorite topic: configuration management. I hope this has not been posted before (i did check the archives). I apologize if it has.
I'm trying to figure out how to implement something with a sort of "hybrid no-op" mechanism. I've been doing a great deal of research to try to find the best tool for the job. Of the most popular configuration management tools, each one has a dry-run or no-op mode. I especially like bcfg2's feature that lets you step through your configuration and pick and choose which things to change; however, bcfg2 doesn't seem to have a good way to "kick" the clients to force an update at a given time. Puppet has this, so I'm leaning in that direction right now. Additionally, I work in an environment where production changes have to be carefully controlled and documented and can only occur during certain time windows. So what I'm looking for is something that allows my clients to run in dry-run mode most of the time (reporting back to me which things need to be changed, but not taking any action), and then let me send a message to them when it's time to actually execute the changes. It seems that the best I might be able to do is leave my regular agent running in dry-run mode all the time, but then ssh into the servers in question one by one and execute the agent in active mode when I want to make the changes, but that is obviously cumbersome and has a number of drawbacks. Does anyone know of a cleaner way to accomplish this? I've looked specifically at bcfg2, puppet, cfengine, and chef. Everyone seems to assume you want things very automatic or not at all. Thanks, Paul _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
