[AusNOG] PXE boot with custom on the fly builds

[Julien Goodwin]

On 28/10/10 11:23, Bradley Falzon wrote:
> (On what Peter just said, I still prefer cfengine (C vs Python) - but
> Puppet and Chef have both had some pretty good reviews).
Puppet is of course Ruby. Which brings along all the massive *FAIL* of
Rails, but other bits make up for it.

> But ultimately, you could shortcut a lot of this using VMWare vSphere
> Clone tools (Supports Windows and Linux). We tested it briefly with
> CentOS, and VMWare allowed us to clone an template, then during
> deployment from within VMWare, we are asked which IP to configure the
> guest with. This obviously requires VMWare and it's infrastructure
> (VirtualCentre Server and Client).

I'm not a fan of cloning, it's very easy to get into a state where a
product is uninstallable as you just clone an existing copy and change
settings and upgrade.

Fully automatic *installations* are a great thing and shouldn't be
underestimated.

> Other points to note is that you might want to also deploy Centralised
> Authentication, off LDAP or similar to deal with your username and
> password issues (using cfengine to configure that).
We just have puppet deploy our engineers ssh keys to the root account.

-- 
Julien Goodwin
Studio442
"Blue Sky Solutioneering"