auto configuration systems

Eero Volotinen eero.volotinen at iki.fi
Sat Apr 15 15:21:10 UTC 2017


How about

ansible/chef/puppet or saltstack?

Eero

12.4.2017 1.23 ip. "Xen" <list at xenhideout.nl> kirjoitti:

> I just want to ask here colloquially.
>
> The promise of Linux is of course that you can modify your own system.
>
> But if you do; you run into the issue of perpetuating your changes.
>
> Keeping configuration alive through many installs is not very useful; and
> hence you seek a way to regenerate config or to reapply it from some config
> system that you design or use from someone else.
>
> I am sure there are millions such systems in the world because everyone
> pretty much develops his own thing :p.
>
> But are there any well known such systems that you use?
>
> For example I had a set of patches that would turn off systemd cryptsetup
> because it doesn't support keyscripts; the installer script I created for
> it would just check everything and the end result would be a re-applying of
> all changes without destroying anything.
>
> Because the script did all the checking, there was no headache for me. But
> this was a one time thing, and you look into formalizing the process so it
> doesn't take so much effort the next time. Then at some point you have a
> system in which you declaratively can specify patches or whatever, or
> changes, or commands, and you have a form of manifests and you just run a
> script that checks all the manifests and runs all the scripts and if you
> have this integrated very well it means that on a new system you can just
> "run all manifests" and presto you have the same system again.
>
> One example is that in KDE (Kubuntu) there would be a problem with the
> KWallet not realizing that there was no KDE4 wallet to migrate; but still
> trying, and you required a manual config change to make it stop nagging and
> all of these things can be very tiring to have to apply by hand.
>
> Other stuff may be installing a custom grub (if you have no package for it
> yet) or typical services (ie. in /etc/systemd/system) that you design for
> your system, or stuff in /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks, etc.
>
> Many of these elements is stuff that stays with you over time. You can
> manually back up those files (or create a file list you can feed to tar and
> it will archive up all of these individual files or directories) or you can
> also just recreate the files or copy them from some config "unit" you have
> for regenerating system configs.
>
> I have done at least in different situations:
> - the tar list
> - a single "redo config" script
> - a manifest system (rudimentary)
> - a script that can find and replace occurrances in an existing config.
>
> And I know there are some that have developed these systems in-house and
> are using them company-wide, for instances. Lately it seems to be about
> yaml files? I don't know.
>
> (I even at some point created a system that can automatically download
> reliable persistent links on the internet in terms of (mostly) open source
> sources or packages such that in the face of calamity or whatever you would
> be able to easily regenerate some (modified system) config including
> compiled binaries from the web all just for the sake of not having to
> repeat stuff manually in case calamity does strike (or you just want to
> move something to a different system). )
>
> Making backups of "permanent files" is all nice and dandy but having
> regeneration "recipes" that can be automatically executed is like a much
> more condensed and meaningful collection of artifacts that does not get
> mingled with: default configuration options, pecularities of a current
> system, etc.
>
> In addition perhaps to it being usable by others (or yourself).
>
> And I was meaning to say this is all rather unfinished and incomplete and
> rudimentary.
>
> So my question would have been: do you use any complete systems like that?
>
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