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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Proper configuration management Post 302966623 by solaris_user on Sunday 14th of February 2016 06:02:00 PM
Old 02-14-2016
Proper configuration management

Recently i started to work in new company. I will replace old admin who is going into retirement and he has been showing me his procedures for server, database and network administration.

From first point of view: there is absolutely no configuration management involved how they deploy software or patches. Yes there is test, development and production systems but I think this is not enough.

For example: I need to make a change. Log into production server, do what do you need to do and log out. Every admin has root access and so on.

My ex. employer had a strict policy how to apply changes in production environment. Every change involved creating system package (RPM, SYSVR4 or IPS), push that package into repository. From there I installed package to test server and if everything was good package would be installed into production. No admin could ever log into production environment.

I know there are tool like Puppet and Chef where I can specify a recipe what to do but I never used them for any serious work.

So my questions are:

1. Is it good to have only three environments (test, development, production) and no other configuration policy in medium-size enterprise?
2. Is it better to stick with ex. employer policy to bring all changes as system packages or is better to learn some tool like Chef?
3. How do you perform configuration management?
 

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KNIFE-CONFIGURE(1)						    Chef Manual 						KNIFE-CONFIGURE(1)

NAME
knife-configure - Generate configuration files for knife or Chef Client SYNOPSIS
knife configure [client] (options) DESCRIPTION
Generates a knife.rb configuration file interactively. When given the --initial option, also creates a new administrative user. CONFIGURE SUBCOMMANDS
knife configure (options) -i, --initial Create an initial API Client -r, --repository REPO The path to your chef-repo Create a configuration file for knife. This will prompt for values to enter into the file. Default values are listed in square brackets if no other entry is typed. See knife(1) for a description of configuration options. knife configure client directory Read the knife.rb config file and generate a config file suitable for use in /etc/chef/client.rb and copy the validation certificate into the specified directory. EXAMPLES
o On a freshly installed Chef Server, use knife configure -i to create an administrator and knife configuration file. Leave the field blank to accept the default value. On most systems, the default values are acceptable. user@host$ knife configure -i Please enter the chef server URL: [http://localhost:4000] Please enter a clientname for the new client: [username] Please enter the existing admin clientname: [chef-webui] Please enter the location of the existing admin client's private key: [/etc/chef/webui.pem] Please enter the validation clientname: [chef-validator] Please enter the location of the validation key: [/etc/chef/validation.pem] Please enter the path to a chef repository (or leave blank): Creating initial API user... Created (or updated) client[username] Configuration file written to /home/username/.chef/knife.rb This creates a new administrator client named username, writes a configuration file to /home/username/.chef/knife.rb, and the private key to /home/username/.chef/username.pem. The configuration file and private key may be copied to another system to facilitate adminis- tration of the Chef Server from a remote system. Depending on the value given for the Chef Server URL, you may need to modify that set- ting after copying to a remote host. SEE ALSO
knife(1) knife-client(1) AUTHOR
Chef was written by Adam Jacob adam@opscode.com with many contributions from the community. DOCUMENTATION
This manual page was written by Joshua Timberman joshua@opscode.com. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and / or modify this docu- ment under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License. CHEF
Knife is distributed with Chef. http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home Chef 10.12.0 June 2012 KNIFE-CONFIGURE(1)
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