On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 02:31:09PM +0000, Brian Candler wrote:
> That makes a lot of sense. But enforcing that policy might be
> difficult. This is important if you're relying on your gold server
> for disaster recovery purposes - if the target machines had some
> change made which nobody remembers and weren't reflected in the
> gold server, then any freshly-built machines will be
> non-functional.
This is a cultural problem, but there's an adequate technical
solution: aggressively sync the client machines. Admins quickly
learn to make changes in the central when their changes get blown
away every hour.
At my last job, we used cfengine to manage a handful of Solaris
zones that bounced around a cluster of machines. Each zone would be
built and destroyed every time it moved from one machine to the
other, so any non-cfengine changes made to the system would be lost.
We hadn't been using cfengine for very long, but everyone picked up
on it quite rapidly. ;)
cfengine (and other configuration management thingies, I suppose)
can alert you when key files change. So if someone's mucking around
with /etc/rc on the machine, cfengine can back it up, put in the
'gold' copy, and whine about it.
--
o--------------------------{ Will Maier }--------------------------o
| web:.......http://www.lfod.us/ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
*------------------[ BSD Unix: Live Free or Die ]------------------*
