Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) writes: > The obstacle that has always held me back from automating is the lack > of demand for identical systems, *and* the requirement to have > essentially written a copy & pastable procedure as prerequisite > before you could automate. So far what I'm seeing today doesn't > suggest otherwise...
Something like a Puppet manifest (to use the terminology I'm familiar with) turns to be both an *executable* specification (so you don't have to retype, or even cut-and-paste, commands from a text file yourself) but also precise configuration documentation. Configuration management isn't just useful for making a lot of systems have the same configuration, but for making sure individual systems have the correct configurations and can be easily recreated when necessary. One thing to avoid when using configuration management, though, is treating it like shell scripting or other procedural programming languages. Generally configuration management systems are designed as declarative languages, meaning they encode a desired state rather than the specific process needed to create that state. You can typically still make sure some things happen before others using dependency ordeing, and while you also typically have the hooks to run specified commands or scripts, you should try to avoid using those unless no other feature of the configuration management system can be used to accomplish the thing you need. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
