Re: Bootstrapping

[Nate Campi]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 02:37:40PM -0600, Luke A. Kanies wrote:
> 
> There is a distressing lack of 'best practices' in the cfengine world, I
> think.  As I've developed my own I am trying to publish them (and my
> cfengine series will focus much more on best practices than on the
> technology, since the reference is so good), but (as has been mentioned
> many times) it'd be great if we as a community could work more on this.

Well I know what I plan to do once I'm done writing a book (unrelated to
cfengine) - come up with some cfengine best practices and system
administration best practices all wrapped around debian linux.

I want to bootstrap an entire small network, DNS, DHCP,
routing/gateway/firewalling, web site under CVS control with staging
site, mail server (postfix/courier or postfix/cyrus), fileserver (NFS
and samba I guess, maybe AFS if I get around to learning it), directory
services (LDAP for accounts, probably kerberos for auth and win2k domain
trusts), automated installation as well.

There's no reason setting up new a network needs to include reinventing
everything. More small networks could be standardized, and benefit from
the collective wisdom of the cfengine community (at least the ones
contributing to this effort) for all the small things that make a system
run better (like automatically syncing /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf
to a postfix chroot, which is easy to forget when you move a host to a
new subnet).

A surprising amount of configuration could be shared across sites,
enabling networks to get up quickly, and run better. Consultants could
come into networks they've never been on before, but quickly solve
problems and roll out new services, since he/she already understands the
cfengine setup.

This is what I'd want the community-contributed cfengine configs to come
from - actual use, practices proven on real networks. It would need to
be it's own project, with active contributers. I plan on starting it on
my own, then seeing if people want to join in once I have something
working to get at least a small network up from scratch. It would
probably need to be a custom debian distro on a CD, to bootstrap the
whole process from a gold server.

Sorry if this is off-topic.
-- 
Nate

Backups?  We doan *NEED* no steenking baX%^~,VbKx    NO CARRIER