| fernand0 | 2 again? |
|---|---|
| AfC | oops |
| AfC | thanks |
| fernand0 | hehe |
| feistel | where come in WBEM in the actual UNIX infraestucture? |
| AfC | feistel: I'm not very knowledgeable of that, but it's defintely a step in the right direction. I'll be returning to configuration management in a bit |
| feistel | <AfC> you need some language to express the configuration, and you want to be able to specify different configurations for different classes of machines (mail servers, web servers, dns machines, etc) |
| feistel | like MOF? |
| AfC | Personally, I like what SmartFrog has been up to, and BCFG shows great promise. |
| AfC | To answer your question, lots of people have expressive languages. Some are descriptive, others are proscriptive. |
| AfC | The trouble I would hope to point out is simply that they usually don't encompass the entire problem; |
| AfC | ie, |
| AfC | configuration management is all fine and nice, but how do you bootstrap the machines? |
| AfC | ie |
| AfC | If you can rebuild machines from scratch, why are you wasting time backing them up? |
| feistel | and the cost? |
| AfC | and better yet, if you have a decent high availability solution of the Yahoo / Google class, then you don't even need to care about individual nodes. |
| AfC | in the case of the backup question, the cost I would assess would be time - to - recover. |
| riel | AfC, there is a Fedora project going on to help deploy systems, mostly aimed at desktops currently |
| riel | http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/ |
| riel | something like this may be interesting |
| AfC | riel: cool. I didn't know about that one. Great! |
| riel | (and yes, I could see that go in the direction of grid computing) |
| AfC | feistel: I would also observe that "recover my file that I accidentally deleted", and "oops, we lost the data center, now what?" are fundamentally different problems. Dealing with it is partly figuring out the separation of code/config/binaries (all replaceable) and data (irreplaceable) |
| AfC | riel: yup! |
The Organizing Comittee
