Re: Bootstrapping

[John Sechrest]

Nate Campi <nate@campin.net> writes:

 % >  A) Why would this not work as a component of the CFengine work that
 % >     is already going on?

 % Well I suppose I mean separate mailing list, so as not to bother this
 % list.

 At some level yes, because there are many detailed little
 cfengine configuration issues that need to be understood.

 And much of that will be noise to the list.

 On the other hand, getting real globally abstracted cfengine
 configurations for each of the roles is a good thing to talk about on
 this list.

 I am aiming at cfengine configurations for roles like:


MLN Roles
---------
web
mail-frontend
mail-backend
mysql
lustre-client
lustre-mds
lustre-ost
boinc
seti
boinc-backend
dns
radius
dhcp
ldap
shell
condor
monitor
syslog
smb
meta-config
policyhost
disk-nfs
gw

So each of these will take work and talking and lots of details.
And I am not sure how much this list wants to watch that process. 


 % >  C) Do you care that there already is an ongoing project working
 % >     on the same issue? (We got our sourceforge project approved recently)

 % Cool. I thought hard about going exactly the way you're going, with
 % UML's, right in line with the "utility computing" buzzword being slung
 % around a lot in the press and vendor marketing materials.

 % I decided against it, since we can make configuration of real hosts
 % almost as easy, and get all their performance. I have a surprising
 % number of hosts lacking on CPU, DISK and memory resources, mostly mail
 % servers. I need every last ounce of capacity out of a lot of my hosts.
 % There are very expensive and modern hardware platforms, it's just that
 % we have large clusters of mail and web servers that work very, very
 % hard.

 The nice thing about doing UML is that once you have the configurations,
 the systems will not care if they are UML instances or real machines.

 And so by doing UML, I get the other for free. 

 And I get the ability to do testing rapidly.

 In any case, we are on a roll and trying to make regular progress.

 

-----
John Sechrest          .         Helping people use
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