[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk/Cobbler templating features pending in Cobbler 1.3 == config management

[Gerhardus.Geldenhuis at gta-travel.com]

Hi
It sounds great. It would certainly be an improvement on the current
config management without trying to represent the complexity of a fully
fledged config management tool in the gui.

Ultimately though it might still be nice to "choose" a config management
system in the gui or at least be able to easily change it. How you would
do this I am not sure and need to give it a bit more thought and play
arond a bit more with config management. Or as you argued adding it to
the gui does not add any real value.

Regards

> -----Original Message-----
> From: spacewalk-list-bounces at redhat.com 
> [mailto:spacewalk-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Michael DeHaan
> Sent: 06 October 2008 16:03
> To: 'spacewalk-list at redhat.com'
> Subject: [Spacewalk-list] Spacewalk/Cobbler templating 
> features pending in Cobbler 1.3 == config management
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> I know Cobbler/Spacewalk integration is ongoing so I wanted 
> to bring up a new Cobbler feature that may help with 
> configuration management as well as provisioning.  This is a 
> new feature that has just been suggested a few weeks ago but 
> I think it's interesting -- primarily because it's incredibly 
> simple to do.
> 
> Basically James Cammarata's pending patches to cobbler 
> (posted to the cobbler mailing list) allow us to use 
> Cobbler's templating mechanism to template arbitrary files 
> (not just kickstarts and yum configs) using 
> Cheetah.    This would be usable as a future templating mechanism for 
> configuration files within Satellite, potentially replacing 
> Satellite config management without bringing in the problems 
> of managing a more complicated configuration management 
> infrastructure.
> 
> At the command line level, it looks like this:
> 
> cobbler system edit --name=foo
> --template-files="/srv/source.template=/etc/foo/bar
> /srv/source2.template=/etc/baz/glurp"
> 
> Basically this allows a hash of "source=destination" keypairs 
> to be applied anywhere throughout the cobbler "distro, 
> profile, system" object chain.  These templates can then be 
> inherited between distributions, 
> profiles, and systems.   Any cobbler variables applied to 
> "--ksmeta" can 
> then be evaluated through the template, and the template can 
> also contain any Cheetah directives of Cobbler snippets (see 
> cheetahtemplate.org/learn).
> 
> In kickstart %post, a kickstart snippet translates these to a 
> series of simple wget's to suck down the files and install 
> them on the systems in 
> the right locations.   This is all automatically built out 
> for the user 
> so the provisioning stage automatically deploys the template files:
> 
> A logical extension of this is a call in koan to keep 
> templates up to date:
> 
> koan --server=cobbler.example.org --system=foo.example.org 
> --update-files
> 
> This would pull down the files given in "--template-files" 
> and retemplate them dynamically.
> 
> Essentially you get an ultra-lightweight configuration 
> management system for free for users who do not want to 
> assume the complexity of maintaining a Puppet and/or cfengine 
> infrastructure, which can at times 
> feel very much like a development exercise.   (We also know 
> of a couple 
> of major puppet problems presently -- (A) rpmdb corruption, 
> and (B) packaging each package install in a single yum 
> transaction leading to a long install time overhead.
> 
> As I know we wanted to streamline Satellite's configuration 
> management, this may be an interesting proposal as it uses 
> the same tools as the install system and can manage both in 
> parallel If someone wanted to use a heavier CMS on top of 
> things, they still could, though this would provide an option 
> similar to what they have now, with the additional ability to 
> use the full power of Cheetah inside their templates. 
> 
> Cobbler profiles then become the same concept for managing an 
> existing system as they do a "to-be-installed" system.
> 
> Anyway, we still have to implement a bit before the above is 
> feasible, but I wanted to throw the idea out there so we 
> could be thinking of 
> it.   It seems to be a very powerful idea and also something 
> that would 
> be trivial to fit into a GUI.   I am a bit worried that while 
> puppet/cfengine/bcfg2 are awesomely powerful, putting them 
> into a GUI app for integration reasons does not really offer 
> any advantages over 
> using them stock.   With the above, we could have a lightweight CM 
> system in the core Spacewalk app and still allow usage of 
> those said tools out of band as needed.  Should folks /do/ 
> want to integrate with Puppet or another CMS, they have tools 
> like this 
> https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/UsingCobblerWithConfigMa
> nagementSystem
> that we could do to help them with this, but some "vi" is 
> still required.
> 
> --Michael
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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