From: david@lang.hm Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 02:34:57 GMT Subject: Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Sat, 20 Oct 2012, Drew Northup wrote: > On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 12:57 AM, wrote: >> On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote: >>> david@lang.hm writes: >>>> I've got a directory tree that holds config data for all my >>>> servers. This consists of one directory per server (which is updated >>>> periodically from what is currently configured on that server), plus >>>> higher level summary reports and similar information. >>>> >>>> today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a >>>> commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and >>>> again when the top-level stuff is created. >>> >>> It is quite clear to me what you are keeping at the top-level files, >>> but if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are >>> shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical "gold-master" >>> configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with >>> a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep >>> the machine specific tweaks as differences from the canonical stuff, >>> instead of having N subdirectories (one per machine). >> >> In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many >> different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't >> the config to be pushed out to the boxes (i.e. what they should be), it's >> instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools. >> >> The systems are all built with a standard image, but the automation tools I >> do have tend to push identical files out to many of the systems (or files >> identical except for a couple of lines) > > David, > Is there any particular reason you aren't using etckeeper? not really, I've thought of that as a tool for managing a single system. Some of the data in configs is sensitive (and much of it is not in /etc), but I guess I should be able to work around those issues. I can e-mail 'patches' to the central server, but I'm then back to the same question that I started out with. How can I sanely organize all these different, but similar sets of files on the central server? David Lang