glump and config management

[Mike McGrath]

As many of you know we've been looking to make our configuration
management system a bit more robust.  Primarily by trying to find a
technological solution to actually enforce our config management
system.

One of the systems I've looked at is glump, provided by the Duke guys
and Seth.  The system itself isn't *just* a configuration management
system.  Its really a systems framework that is very modular in
nature.  Its a bit rough around the edges right now but in true Fedora
spirit I'd like to suggest we adopt this technology and make it
better.  It'll work for us out of the box, and with  Duke as upstream
we're not alone in using it.

I've got one working sample that just copies a file to your /tmp/
directory.  Interesting items to note is once /tmp/test1 is created,
if you alter it and re-run the script, a backup noting the date and
time is created.  This is especially handy in our environment where
not everyone always follows the rules.  Consider it a safe and gentle
reminder ;-)

Be warned, there is a slight learning curve.  The actual 'config
management' stuff is done in a script here called 'head'  glump itself
really just glues a bunch of files together into this one script.
Once you start poking around at it you'll see what I mean.  But think
of the files listed in glue.xml as groups of config files.  For
example, we could have a phx file and an app server file for app
servers in the phx colo.  You get the idea.  Check out the source if
you're interested:

http://mmcgrath.net/~mmcgrath/glump-example.tar.gz  (The actual glump
source and configuration)

http://mmcgrath.net/~mmcgrath/configfiles.tar.gz (sample configs)

You can run the script by typing:

wget -qO - http://mmcgrath.net/cgi-bin/glump.py | sh

Don't take my word that it won't fark your system up, take a look for
yourself at what its running!  It should just create two log files in
/tmp and a file called /tmp/test

We would use this in addition to our current CVS system though we
should probably give all the servers a good once-over and re-sync the
configs for those servers that are out of sync.

Seth, please correct or make more clear anything that I've munged up.

What do you all think?

                -Mike