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Be A System Dictator: Prescribing Configuration Policies
By Taylor Gillespie
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-09-09
In an era of networked, highly-available devices, where disparate technologies co-exist, tethered to each other through wired and wireless vectors, the notion of remote administration became a reality, BIOS refinements led to the prevalence of networked installation of operating systems, and rapid hardware advancements provide quick turnover of key nodes in an infrastructure.
System administration, for the most part, includes key tasks when bringing a new piece of hardware into the infrastructure, from editing configuration files, syncing needed data, and setting up the initial environment. Once deployed, the machine's configuration state must be policed and the proper policies enforced to ensure that the configuration is maintained. At this point, configuration management software becomes more and more necessary. Using configuration management software saves a system administrator's sanity and helps guarantee the state of the machine remains unwaivering.
Many, many, numerous configuration managers exist. For the most part, system administrators will be interested in configuration managers that can monitor and handle machines in a mixed environment of Unix-like boxes (Linux, OS X, HP-UX, AIX) and Windows machines (2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7). With that in mind, four popular choices emerge: Cfengine, Puppet, Chef, and Radmind. Each package has an independent approach of how to handle the problem of initial configuration and continued configuration integrity. From checking configuration files, software dependencies, and in the case of Windows, monitoring the registry, these software tools expand the limits of a system administrator. Depending of a system administrator's preference for one paradigm over the other, and the repeated performance of the management software's algorithms, and of course the software license, determine which software package an administrator is more apt to use.
Cfengine has been in development since the early nineties, so it has years of development and distilled experience. It is still the choice of top system administrators, and it's maturity gives some solace for being so future-proof.
Puppet gained significant userbase during the last few years. It has its own descriptive language to configure the configuration, but the descriptive language is an intermediate choice. Puppet has higher-level semantics than most configuration management software.
Chef, is a newer entrant in the configuration management software arena. Based more on Ruby than others, it has gained popularity in web application deployment, and rapidly designed configurations. Being the more recent addition, Chef is able to bring fresh perspectives and paradigms to configuration management.
Radmind, has been popular, especially in Mac-heavy environments. It continues the Unix philosophy of having separate simple tools working together to solve a more complex problem. Though not heavily developed, Radmind stills has a following.
Choosing the right configuration management tool is not something a system administrator should choose haphazardly. The configuration management software will go a long way to easing and ensuring configuration are properly maintained, but be forewarned, your choice will be with you for a long-haul, possibly for years. Choose wisely on what you want to marry to your organization's infrastructure, a divorce of this magnitude could be painful. But with promises of infrastructure and administration automation, what system administrator would not be smitten?
About the Author:
Taylor is a Staff Writer for WebProNews
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