Re: Administering a thousand hosts

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, Darío Mariani wrote:
>Hello:
> I'm facing the problem of administering a thousand servers
>distributed all over Latin America. All servers will be similar
>(probably a RedHat based distribution) and will not have critical data
>stored locally.
> Is it possible to administer it with cfengine?. Does anyone know of
>some tips or documentation for administering such monster with
>cfengine?.

I'll suggest something similar to what I've done.

Start with a single machine, set it up as your cfengine master.  Get the
process of rolling out new configs to that master server working, and test
out updates of that config to a single machine.

To build new machines, check out Red Hat's kickstart.  Have a cfengine
package (I recommend those from Dag Wieers repository,
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/cfengine ) installed in the %post section and
get the machine enrolled and updating from the beginning.

As there's no critical data locally, I hope I can assume correctly that you
just need to start services, edit configuration files, and so on.  That's
all pretty trivial with cfengine.  I wrote a couple of articles about doing
this on Red Hat with cfengine, urls follow:

http://shipyard.com.au/shipyard/articles/sysadmin/cfengine-processes.py
http://shipyard.com.au/shipyard/articles/sysadmin/cfengine-configfiles.py

Hope that helps.