Re: Radmind vs CFengine

[Mark . Burgess]

>> On  7 Jan, Chris Kacoroski wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am looking to implement an enterprise infrastructure (see
>>> infrastructures.org) and am trying to decide between radmind and
>>> cfengine.  Searching the archives and google, The only thing I could
>>> find was a transcript from a LISA '03 BoF session on configuration
>>> management.  After looking at both it seems that cfengine allows a
>>> person to program into it semantics of the system files (e.g. the
>>> editfiles command) while radmind does not have any idea of what may be
>>> in a file.  As such radmind can only replace files which makes it much
>>> simpler to use (e.g. no scripts to write).  In addition, radmind
>>> enables a person to install software on a machine and then it will
>>> automatically figure out what files were changed and create a script 
>>> to
>>> replication the installation on other machines.
>>>
>>> Question1: Does anyone have examples of when just replacing a file 
>>> will
>>> not work?
>>
>> This is not really the point. The point is that sometimes you do not 
>> want
>> to manage the entire content of a file. e.g. you might have very 
>> different
>> versions of inetd.conf on each host, and just want to make sure that 
>> no host
>> has ftp enabled, or that all machines should definitely have a web 
>> server, or whatever.
>> i.e. both complete and differential management is possible with 
>> cfengine.
>>
> But is this type of management required?  Couldn't I just keep a 
> separate version of inetd.conf for each host (or group of hosts) on the 
> cfengine server?  I think that the cfengine code would be the same 
> (e.g. a copy file section, instead of an editfiles section).

Yes you can if you want to. But sometimes OSes distribute changes
to these files which you want to keep. You just want to be sure that
your bits are there, but not interfere with OS upgrades etc.

> My concern is that the cfengine scripts will quickly become very 
> complex which is why the Radmind approach is attractive.  cfengine has 
> a much more flexibility, but is there a point where that flexibility 
> shoots you in the foot (or allows you to shoot yourself in the foot :).

Well cfengine can also do the "Radmind approach". So its up to you.
I confess that I don't really know what makes Radmind special.


M

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