[Dclug] Sysadmins: Red Hat Satellite or Git for conf file version control

[Domenick Petrella]

I can't offer any qualified comparison with satellite, because we
decided against using it.  It seemed like an expensive, proprietary way
of moving in the direction we wanted; in other words, there are open
FOSS tools out there that can serve the same purpose, and that are
decoupled from a particular platform.  The features of satellite
notwithstanding, what happens if you decide debian is a better platform
for certain tasks?

Puppet (or other conf management tools) can abstract the platform from
the configuration.  You can run a check to see if you're running on
rhel, or debian, or whatever, and use the native package management to
install software, change config files in the correct location for the
OS, etc.

-Domenick




On 2/14/12 2:29 PM, james dasinger wrote:
> Thanks for all the responses!
>
> @Domenick: are you saying that you use something like RHN Satellite
> just for package management, but then do configuration management with
> a separate tool? I've had some success using the configuration
> management channels in the Satellite... at what point did the RHN
> features become inadequate for you? Or to put another way, what
> capabilities did a dedicated config management tool give you that RHN
> satellite didn't (stuff you actually used)?
>
> I don't have much experience outside my current job so I'm not sure
> what qualifies as big or small, but we have less than 200 systems
> registered in our Satellite right now. We aren't even fully using the
> configuration capabilities of the Satellite as-is. I'm at the point
> where I'm trying to decide whether to put in the effort to get
> everything running tightly in RHN or whether it would be better for
> future growth to go ahead use some other tool. Someone on our dev team
> suggested putting the configs in Git, but it was sort of an offhand
> suggestion.
>
> I'm definitely interested in learning more about Puppet, Chef,
> etc...thanks for the link to the meetup as I'll definitely try to
> attend!! Using something like Puppet has been floated around the
> office lately (we have one dev that's really interested in DevOps) but
> it's still in the exploratory stages.
>
> J.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Domenick Petrella
> <domenick.petrella at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would also recommend a configuration management tool for this, like
>> puppet.  There are others, like chef, cfengine, etc, that you may
>> consider.  I like using package management to deploy software, like rpm,
>> coupled with configuration management.  That gives you a
>> version-controlled environment that can be rolled back fairly easily,
>> and that is repeatable.
>>
>> There's an upcoming meetup on configuration management you may find useful:
>> http://www.meetup.com/DevOpsDC/events/46606602/
>>
>> HTH,
>>
>> -Domenick
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/14/12 12:44 PM, jecottrell3 at comcast.net wrote:
>>> Satellite does many things...it's a very complex and very expensive tool.
>>>
>>> Git is probably a better match. Or even Subversion if you don't mind a Central Repo.
>>>
>>> You might also consider Puppet to manage your conf files as well as other things.
>>>
>>> JIM
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "james dasinger" <jdasinger at googlemail.com>
>>> To: dclug at tux.org
>>> Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2012 12:08:21 PM
>>> Subject: [Dclug] Sysadmins: Red Hat Satellite or Git for conf file version    control
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Newb admin question for you. If you were in a redhat linux environment
>>> and wanted to start getting system .conf files centrally managed, what
>>> are the pros-cons between using the Red Hat Network Satellite or Git
>>> for version control?
>>>
>>> Currently I have an existing Satellite subscription and am using it
>>> for some things, while our app code is managed through Git. Just
>>> looking for experienced opinions.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>> J.
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