auto-softupdate

[Juergen Kahnert]

On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 03:08:23PM +0100, Henning Glawe wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 01:43:12PM +0100, Cedric BRINER wrote:
> > let's say that this softupdate will happen every night. What happen
> > If I'm working on a the configuration space, and that this
> > configuration is not yet working well.
> > 
> > To avoid such situation, I was thinking to give a version to the
> > configuration space, and to do a script on any client which will do
> > a softupdate only if the version of the configuration space is
> > higher than the last softupdate done.
> 
> I am doing it a bit differently: our configuration is kept in a CVS
> repository, where we mark the 'production' versions of the files with
> a sticky tag 'STABLE'.
> the clients check out this tag (setting FAI_CVSTAG variable in fai.conf).
> 
> > Does some one of you has already think of this; is this a good idea ?

We're using a tool called 'salad' for updating > 1000 Unix hosts twice a
day. Over the last years only a few bigger misconfigurations occurred. In
fact, as long as I'm working here I can't remember of a single desaster
caused by misconfiguration. Nothing which could be fixed with the next
cycle.

We've spread the updates over the core time for the daily level and for
the nightly level it's made between 22:00 - 6:00 o'clock.

But it's not(!) made with the FAI softupdate feature. So I can't tell
you if the FAI softupdates are working that stable, too. Salad "cards"
are configuration files, no scripts. I plan to use the softupdate with
FAI on some hosts as soon as I'll find some time to install the new FAI
version.

We have about 15-20 admins who are doing changes on the configurations.
Some more, some less. But everybody knows, that killing > 1000 hosts is
more than a pain so it's used with caution. ;-)

But because of the way FAI is working (executing scripts) it's more
risky doing updates automatically than with a pure configuration tool
like salad, cfengine, quattor, or whatever.

Regards

    Jürgen Kahnert


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