ENH> Config management is great, if you're building new systems, and
ENH> especially if you're building and removing a lot of systems from
ENH> production on a regular basis, and you own it all from scratch. Not
ENH> great if you inherited a small number of undocumented customer facing
ENH> servers which are already in production.
Ehn, I've done that. As you find files that you care about and want to
manage, you chuck them into your config repo, and let Puppet manage them;
this slowly grows, and some is better than none, and more is better than
fewer, so even if you never get to all, things keep getting a little better.
ENH> But if you seriously have only 1-3 servers to maintain, it's not
ENH> worth building another server to be the config management server.
I've done that too, or more precisely, used one of them as the config
management server. Even with only one machine, if you're good with Puppet
(or Cfengine, or Chef, or whatever), using it to maintain your machine can
still be a win.
ENH> (How do you manage the config of the config management server anyway?)
Bootstrapping and feedback loops. Puppet's configuration can be
Puppet-managed just fine; if you don't have Puppet yet, you install
Puppet, and enough Puppet configuration to get your real Puppet
configuration, and away you go. At one former employer, we got a couple of
layers into this, using Cfengine features to detect if you had no
cfengine.conf file, or a corrupt one, etc, and having it bootstrap the
right thing.
-Josh (iril...@infersys.com)
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