[olug] System management tools

[Daniel Pfile]

On Nov 26, 2004, at 8:44 PM, Sean Kelly wrote:
> Anyway, the point of my initial inquiry was to ask if anybody out 
> there is
> using cfengine or anything like it. I am quite familiar with all of the
> other points you covered, and agree that they are very important for 
> system
> administration work.

My bad, my old job has desensitized me, I'm used sysadmins who aren't 
familiar with those concepts.

> You made mention of cfengine, so is it safe to assume that you or your
> company is using it? Did you look into anything else? My goal is to 
> find
> the best cfengine-like tool out there that works with:
>  * Solaris (8, 9, 10)
>  * Linux (RHEL AS 3, RHEL ES 3, various other distributions)
>  * HP-UX (10.20, 11.0, 11.11)
>  * FreeBSD (4.x, 5.x)

I'm no expert (yet) but everything I've read says cfengine is it. I'd 
love to hear if anybody knows of anything else as well. But guessing 
that since both you and I have never heard of anything else, if there 
is something else it's going to be nowhere near as feature complete.

I'm going to start looking into cfengine sometime, as I'm now 
developing all the QA/CM processes for a large DBA shop. Once I turn my 
head away from our deliverables (schemas and so on) I'm going to look 
into automating what's done with db configuration. I have yet to sit 
down with the regular DBAs and see what kind of systems they're using 
yet since I've been mostly working with data modelers.

That said, I dug for some more links.

http://www.open-challenge.nl/scc/index.html

System configuration collector. Looks neat. Should help with your 
baseline.

http://www.stokely.com/unix.sysadm.resources/autosysmgm.backup.html

This looks to be a nice collection of links for doing what you need. 
Lots of interesting projects there.

I'm going to hope you're using some sort of directory to manage users 
and naming. If not, look into it. Gash2 is something I looked into 
while working on another project. It's kind of a meta directory 
configuration engine.

http://tools.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2/

Erm, that links page is nice. I'm going to go through and read some 
more. Let us know if you find anything else that looks useful.

-- Daniel