On 13 January 2012 01:57, Paul Graydon <p...@paulgraydon.co.uk> wrote: > On 01/12/2012 03:51 PM, chaim.rie...@gmail.com wrote: >> >> On 1/12/2012 4:43 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote: >>> Something to think about before attempting to centrally manage, your >>> systems actually have to be centrally manageable -- that doesn't happen >>> automatically and requires extra work. >>> >>> >> this is why i never update. i would rather build a new image and deploy it >> to the thousands of servers than worry about updates. be it an openssh >> security notice, or new ntp configuration, for me it is easier to rebuild >> servers than update config files. >> > For that matter, imaging is a bad way to go about handling this, you'd be > better served by setting up something like Puppet or Chef and have them > handle configuration management for you centrally, along with necessary > software packages. > > Paul
I looked into Puppet and though I've got it managing parts of our infrastructure it seems quite difficult to bolt on to an existing setup. There are also some things that I can't see how to do easily with Puppet ("Don't upgrade packages on the live environment until we've tested them in staging" being a big one.) I'm starting to look at Blueprint (http://devstructure.com) to help build the Puppet manifests so that we can deploy Puppet without breaking any existing machines, Puppet for configuration management and Spacewalk to audit what is up-to-date and help schedule security updates. Dan