[et-mgmt-tools] Sysdirector

[Michael DeHaan]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 07:44:30AM -0400, Harry Hoffman wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> Just stumbled across this and was wondering if the RH/Fedora folk have 
>> come across this and whether or not it fits up with Spacewalk, Cobbler, 
>> Func., etc.
>>
>> http://www.sysdirector.org/
>>     
>
>  "SysDirector is a template driven configuration management system that
>   allows administrators to deliver content to machines in a protocol 
>   independent fashion."
>
> This is really solving the wrong problem.  You really don't want to be
> working in terms of configuration file templates. You want to work 
> based off functional configuration requirements, and have the tool
> itself decide what the actual config file settings need to be. This is
> the core benefit of using Puppet over cfengine. Combine puppet with
> Augeas, and you make it really easy to modify config file settings
> in-place without using templates.
>
> Daniel
>   

I talked with one of the authors for a while on IRC last week, just to 
understand what they were trying to do, since typically Cobbler+puppet 
(or cfengine for some) is the way /most/ of the people here manage their 
systems. (That, and it seems nagios+cacti for monitoring/trending).

Sysdirector is apparently glue for puppet/cfengine+their homegrown PXE 
provisioning. They had heard of Cobbler but had not looked at it.

My main concern is that it uses Twisted to provide TFTP and HTTP 
services, rather than tftp-server and Apache. I suspect that will cause 
some rather painful scaling issues. Also there is no virtualization 
solution, and in present times, being able to support virtualization at 
the same level of physical systems is critical. Twisted has always 
struck me as a rather experimental "wouldn't it be cool if" kind of 
library, but not something I would consider for production server building.

Ultimately, I wish them luck, and open source allows for choice. If 
people like it they will use it, but the real power in OSS development 
is in communities, feedback, and design. I am really proud of the 
community we have here and I expect that if there is something we're 
lacking you'll tell us (and maybe even help us build it). So, if there 
is something you like about sysdirector that we /don't/ do, or other 
tools integrating some of our favored tools don't exist, tell us what it 
is, and we'll try to make it better.

--Michael