Re: Bootstrapping

[Luke A. Kanies]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Nate Campi wrote:

> 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.

If things go well, I may try to write a cfengine book this year.  If you
want one, email O'Reilly. :)

> 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.

I've been half-heartedly working on this for a while, and this is one of
the main goals of my consultancy.  I'm trying to get to the point where I
can walk into a company with a CD or an appliance and quickly bootstrap
an automated infrastructure.  A single processor system can do most of
this stuff for most companies, and for those who need more power, it's
pretty easy to bootstrap bigger boxes off the smaller one.

> 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.

I think it's on topic.  I'd be glad to work with you on it, as that's what
I'll be doing this year anyway (along with a couple other time-consuming
initiatives, like doing enough consulting to continue eating until I get
the bootstrapper done).

Luke

-- 
"I think that's how Chicago got started.  A bunch of people in New York
said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't
cold enough. Let's go west.' "
     --Richard Jeni