This is true that most shops will come up with standard configuration files and just drop them in place and run any commands required to activate those changes. I think the difficult part becomes dealing with patches/updates that can clobber these customizations. With the direction things have gone with OpenSolaris and AI, it would appear things may have become more complicated. With the lack of begin and finish scripts, as we had in jumpstart, AI will probably be a steep learning curve. Most shops do customizations (packages, patches, security settings, storage configuration, features like ipmp/mpxio/jass/etc, and so on) before the first boot up off of disks for auditing requirements. Not to mention some shops will automate multiple reboots to enable or install additional things. There have been some conversations in some of the other mailing lists on this topic. I think it brings up other areas OpenSolaris should address, like having a cmdb of some kind for tracking/auditing and doing intelligent dependency/merging of configuration file changes brought on manually or through IPS.
What do you guys think? *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Peter Tribble <peter.trib...@gmail.com> To: sysadmin <sysadmin-discuss@opensolaris.org> Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2009 11:40:05 AM Subject: Re: [sysadmin-discuss] Administration - commands or files? On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.trib...@gmail.com> wrote: > So, a question for the weekend: > > When administering something, do you prefer to issue a bunch of commands > to set configuration parameters, or edit a configuration file that the > thing can read? My own answer: edit the configuration file. When first experimenting with a new tool, then playing around interactively with it is good. After that, I want to do things directly in one shot. In many cases, all the tools are doing is editing a file for you. Also, how to backup and restore a configuration, or replicate it to another system? Virtually nothing comes back with the sequence of interactive commands necessary to reproduce the current configuration. Many things can output the configuration file, or you can copy it straight off the system. It's only a short step from that to directly generating new configuration files without the tools getting in the way. Configuration becomes dropping the files in place; validation is a case of comparing the configuration file on a system with the one in the master repository. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list sysadmin-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list sysadmin-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss
