Re: Bootstrapping

[Luke A. Kanies]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, John Sechrest wrote:

>  I am finding that if I can seperate the "rules" from the "data"
>  about which domain it is or which service I want to run,
>  Then I can get pretty close.

Can you give me an example of what you're reading in vs. what you have in
the configurations?

>  % Because it involves about 15 other packages and all of their
>  % configurations.
>
>  Interesting. Can you help me understand those other packages and
>  configurations you are working with?

Well, what Nate and I are talking about building is an appliance-like
infrastructure bootstrap server:  You walk in with a box, and it's got
(for example) cfengine, Nagios, Cricket, OpenLDAP, Apache, a DNS service
(preferably based out of LDAP), CVS, and probably a few more packages.
You boot the machine up and set the basic host data, and you're off.  Now
you just check your cfengine configurations into CVS, add your hosts to
LDAP, and you're done:  You've got a self-maintaining, self-monitoring,
convertent infrastructure with version controlled configurations.

I don't think it's even that difficult; you just need configuration
generators for all of your applications.  We're not actually talking about
much unique information here -- it's all host-specific, except the users
who need to modify the host information.

>  I am glad to hear that. Right now, I think one of the good things
>  to work on would be to abstract the definitions of roles
>  and what those mean.

I am not sure what you mean when you say "roles".  Are you talking about
the definition of a web server, or something like that?

>  Our UML configuration tool (MLN) is proving to be valuable in
>  my process of doing that. I hope we will get the source forge
>  site up with the .7 version soon.

That would be great.

>  Can you help us take a role of that list that went around
>  and convert it into an abstract set of rules
>  in english (or at least predicate calculus), so that we can
>  talk about it before we implement it in cfengine?

I don't know what you mean.  Can you give some more detail?

-- 
Computers are not intelligent.  They only think they are.