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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Configuration management—

Jarle BjørgeengenUnix/Storage-admin

University of OsloUSIT

Universitets Senter for IT

January 21, 2011

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Outline

1 About USIT

2 What is a configuration ?

3 What is configuration management ?

4 Configuration management tools

5 Puppet

6 Cfengine

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Key points about USIT

Approximately 50 000 file, print, mail and web-app users inUiO, with different privileges .Dev. and op. of the FS/Studentweb application used bymost universities and collegesDev. and op. of Cerebrum, the glue that ties together allperson/user/machine information.Dev. and op. of the national authentication service "Moria".Op. of mail and file backends for Classfronter for theNordic CountriesData-storage for LHC in Cern.Op. of HPC clusters for research number-crunching.

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

What is a configuration ?

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

What is configuration management ? (Discussion)

The term CMDB (ITIL) ?Deciding what to do and how to do it. Policy ?For us, usually related to automating server maintenance(practical view)Key point: The same-term is widely used in differentmeanings.Clarify meaning and context when discussing with othersto avoid misunderstandings.The terms convergence and idempotens ?The terms context and sets ?Operating system constraints and integration ?

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Configuration management tools

There are many tools. (See also 1 )Examples (free):

Cfengine (Community)PuppetBCFG2LCFGChefMLN (for virtualization)Shell/perl/cron

1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_configuration_management_software

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Configuration management tools

The role of version control ?The role og packages and package managers ?Distribution of authority ?Centrally managed configuration.

Client / server.Level of client autonomy.Scaleability

Automate installation of OS and cfg. agent ? How ?

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Configuration management tools cont.

Examples (nonfree):Cfengine Commercial (Nova)HP OpenViewIBM TivoliBMC BladelogicVMware sw suite for virtualization

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Puppet

Started by Luke Kanies, a Cfengine2 developer at the timeWritten in Ruby (interpreted language, somewhat slow andresource consuming)2

A response to perceived weaknesses in Cfengine2 .... combined with disagreements of future direction ofCfenginequick adoption by users and dev-community.Easy to get started with.Complex to adapt (program new modules in Ruby)

2See provided article

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About USIT What is a configuration ? What is configuration management ? Configuration management tools Puppet Cfengine

Cfengine

The grandfather of all configuration toolsStarted by Mark Burgess in 1993Written in C. (Low overhead) 3

Combined tool developement and research project ofBurgessVersion 2 problems recognized.Thourogh scientific research to answer

the general problem of configuration managementpractical limitations in version 2

V3 released 2008-01-01Complete rewrite addressing V2 problemsWith V3, a commercial version with enhanced usability,reporting (CMDB) and pre-declared configuration rules forcommon purposes.

3See provided article