Hello,

the last days i try to find a good and easy solution to keep new installed Servers with same basic configuration.

for example every new Installed Server should have:

- phpmyadmin installed and configured

- munin installed and configured

- mysql server with some predefined users and passwords

- same users created with existing ssh keys. also ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file with pub key inside :-)
at the moment i use some bash script to create the users and sync the keys..

basically i need to install predefined packages and remove some other packages
configure some config files (or copy working configs)


i have looked at cfengine and puppet Server. and i am asking my self if this tools are overkill for this task...

what is your experience with system management or deployment?
someone knows a easy tool to manage this tasks? :-)
i am getting a little lost with this....

thanks for any advice.

Hello,

Puppet and Chef are the most spread configuration servers that are easy to set up and configure. It really comes down to how many servers you are talking about and if you only want to apply configurations to new servers. If you install/use a configuration server you should use it at the highest capabilities possible, meaning take all the advantages you can get, central configuration, force configuration to servers so that user's configurations without your knowing get undone, and so on. There are a lot of possibilities if you're looking for a configuration server and you can find a comparison on Wikipedia. I suggest you go through that list to check out the features and basics of them and most likely you'll find something that suits your needs.

If you're only looking to install servers with a predefined set of packages and configurations, have a look at Cobbler for Debian. Start at the start page of Cobbler to find out what it can do for you.

Kind regards,

Eric

I dont know about chef, but puppet has a slight learning curve but is fantastic for configuration management across multiple platforms.

I use it to manage 2200 hosts that all kinds of people like to put their hands on and make changes to. Puppet is there to change those important config files back if they are modified in anyway. It can do a lot but it will cost you some research time to get the hang of it.