<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Jesse Becker <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jesse_becker@yahoo.com">jesse_becker@yahoo.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit"><div>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.</div>
</td></tr></tbody></table></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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 ? </div>
<div><br></div><div>Looking at this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management</a> sounds like puppet/cfengine/chef is "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">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 ? </span></div>
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