How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server

Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by mercurial on Monday March 04, 2013 @04:19AM (#5317419)

I love etckeeper, but the use of a configuration management system (puppet/chef/salt...) tends to reduce its usefulness.

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by beagle3 on Monday March 04, 2013 @09:07AM (#5318206)

On the contrary - it is useful exactly to figure out when and what manual changes were made outside of the automated system.

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by mercurial on Monday March 04, 2013 @09:57AM (#5318447)

I'm not sure I get your "on the contrary". Any configuration change on a managed configuration file is transient and bound to overwritten next time state is restored. This makes etckeeper absolutely less useful compared to a system where there is no way to restore state and an unfortunate "rm /etc/passwd" has little remedy. It does not make it "useless", but it's definitely less needed.

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by beagle3 on Monday March 04, 2013 @10:24AM (#5318587)

Possibly my misunderstanding, but I thought chef and puppet only push changes on the files that they are configured to control - There are tens of files in /etc/, some possibly modified by an "apt-get upgrade", then reverted by chef, some that chef/puppet do not try to modify.

etckeeper is a net that gives you an idea of how /etc looked on a given date or apt-run, not just how it was supposed to look (Which is what you get from the chef/puppet logs).

Question to chef/puppet users: do you restore the state continuously? or only when you've made a change?

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by mercurial on Monday March 04, 2013 @10:42AM (#5318689)

Yes, it's true that chef/puppet do not overwrite your entire etc, just a subset of it, but presumably, you'll have your critical components backed by it (otherwise, there is not much point in using a configuration management system). So it is still useful on such a system, but not to the same extent of a system without configuration management.

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by shabble on Monday March 04, 2013 @12:59PM (#5319430)

> but presumably, you'll have your critical components backed by it

Often, the way you discover something is critical is after the first time it breaks. Backups may help, but proper version history is probably going to give better insight into what happened.

Definitely less important, but not useless, IMO.

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by ceejayoz on Monday March 04, 2013 @10:06AM (#5318496)

Isn't the point of Chef/Puppet that you never do that, and if you do, they get reverted automatically?

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by beagle3 on Monday March 04, 2013 @10:31AM (#5318629)

It is the point that you "never do that". However, it's been my experience that e.g. when troubleshooting, people always make local modifications, and don't always remember to revert them / restore from configuration management.

I have no experience with chef/puppet, so I might be mistaken, but I'm under the impression that they only push changes when asked to - which means a local change may survive for several weeks before it is overwritten. But I could be wrong about that.

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Re:How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server by pindi on Monday March 04, 2013 @11:21AM (#5318897)

When run in client-server mode, Puppet will run every 30 minutes by default, overwriting local changes with the configuration on the server.

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