[UFO Chicago] syncing multiple workstations to one master

[Calvin Pryor]

On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Jesse Becker <jesse_becker at yahoo.com>wrote:

> I'd also suggest learning to build RPM/DEB packages as well.  That let's
> you easily encapsulate and distribute programs to multiple machines, but
> that's probably a "stage 2" sort of thing.
>

Jesse you are reading my mind. My next question was going to be how to
abstract the software from the hardware, so we can set up a master system
with all the packages we want, then push these packages to the rest of the
boxes.

How can we replicating packages ? If I add/remove packages from the
"master", can these changes be propagated to the rest of the lab
automatically ? Or would I have to rebuild the "master package" after all
changes are made, and push out this new package manually ? Or are changes in
the packages handled by one of the tools you already mentioned (puppet,
cfengine, chef) ? Since you also suggested learning how to build packages,
I'm guessing puppet/cfengine/chef does not handle the software packages ?

Looking at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management sounds
like  puppet/cfengine/chef is "Computer hardware configuration management"
and package replication is "software configuration management" ? but the
link makes the software stuff seem more like what developers would use ?
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