[svlug] Maintaining config files for various servers

[Catenare LLC]

On Tuesday, Jul 27, 2004, at 10:59 US/Pacific, Mark wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> This will all be a bit fuzzy, but I don't have a very clear idea of 
> what
> exactly I want to do and how. I just thought that a lot of people 
> probably
> were in the same situation before:
>
> I am setting up a cluster of servers and want to make this a easily
> reproducable as possible. For this reason, I want to keep config files 
> for
> all servers in a central place. That way, if I have to re-install a 
> server
> for some reason (for example bacause the disk crashed), I can just get 
> the
> latest version of all the config files I need from that place.
>
> Some of the files I need are:
> iptables, ha (high availablility) config files, ifcfg-eth* files, http
> config files, etc.
> So they will be spread out over different directories. Is there 
> anything
> (preferably an RPM redhat) that does this?
>
> If I had to do it myself, I was thinking about maybe using a directory
> structure like:
>
> server1/etc
> server1/etc/ha.d
> server1/etc/httpd
> server1/etc/sysconfig
>
> server2/etc
> server2/etc/ha.d
> server2/etc/httpd
> server2/etc/sysconfig
> ...
>
> You get the idea...
>
>
> Instead of using various subdirectories, I was wondering if it might be
> better to only use one per server and naming files accordingly with 
> some
> special separator:
> etc^ha.d^haresources
> etc^sysconfig^iptables
>
> This way I could get all the config files in one scp or http download 
> and
> have a script that copies them in place by just replacing "^" with 
> "/". Is
> there any problem with using ^ in filenames? I first wanted to use 
> "#", but
> that might give me some problems in scripts since it ususally starts a
> comment...
>
> Something else I am contemplating at the moment is using yum or 
> up2date to
> copy the config files over to the servers, so I only have to change 
> them in
> the central repository and can copy them over automatically... Up2date 
> would
> be really cool, but it would mean generating RPMs first, which I am 
> still
> having some problems with, too....
>
> Also, some of the config files will be identical for all servers, some 
> will
> be a little different (just 2 lines out of 100) and others will be
> completely different for each machine. How could I avoid too much
> redundancy???
>
> It should be some kind of a solution that is easy to maintain, robust 
> and
> scalable...
>
> Thanks,
>
> MARK
>
>
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> svlug at lists.svlug.org
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>
>
You may want to check out Linux Server Hacks from O'Reilly. Hack #23: 
Using RCS (or another revision control system) to manage system files 
and configuration files and Hack #41: Keeping parts of a filesystem in 
sync with Rsync are two that seems to relate to your question.


Johan Martin
Catenare LLC
670 5th Street
San Francisco, CA. 94107
Phone: (415) 357-5078
Fax: (415) 357-5069
http://www.catenare.com