[H-GEN] CVS for /etc management

[Robert Brockway]

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On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, David Findlay wrote:

> I want to use CVS to manage my /etc files on my server. Can one point me to a
> HOWTO on this, or some tips on what to do and what not to do? Thanks,

Hi David.  There has been a good discussion on the merits of using cvs to
manage files in /etc.  We now know that you want to manage the
configuration of many machines centrally and you were considering cvs for
this.  I'd like to throw a different idea into the pot - or rather 2
different ideas: NIS & LDAP.

By setting up the appropriate service (NIS or LDAP using the NIS schema)
you can centrally manage many of the settings of your unix boxes.  Many of
the settings normally set in /etc can be managed by NIS (and by extension
using LDAP with the NIS map).  LDAP is also highly extensible - afterall
it is really just a directory service, so you are pretty free to decide
what sort of info you want to store in the directory.

This way all of your boxes have access to the very latest configuration
you chose to give them.  You might still cvs manage the config files for
NIS or LDAP.

You would need to look into things like having one or more local slave
copies of each database at each site to prevent a network outage taking
down boxes.  Both LDAP & NIS do this without difficulty and it is easy to
configure some or all of your boxes to have slave copies.

This is a common way that configuration management of a large number of
hostas is conducted.

See http://www.openldap.org for lots of info on LDAP.

Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah


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