Puppet users - Feb 2008 - Guiding principle - adapting TO the environment or adapting the environment

Guys,

I need some input on best practices from the group regarding choosing
between a reactive and proactive approach when determining setup for a
host.

Let me explain. I have an "apt" module that takes care of setting up
common apt settings and provide the basic "sources.list" for the
managed hosts - debian on servers and ubuntu on desktops.

I have chosen to keep the source file as a template
"sources.list.erb", which then holds all the debian/ubuntu specifics

So far so good.

Now, the template file uses the lsb* facts to distinguish between
debian and ubuntu and also to point towards the proper release files.
But this setup is reactive, in the sense that apt updates the file in
accordance with the distribution it can detect, and not the proactive
approach where it knows what distribution to set.

While the current setup works great NOW, it becomes an issue when a
new ubuntu comes out and the workstations require upgrading, which I
would want to do centrally as I have no way to push the fact that they
should be using a particular version.

Any ideas?

-- 
/peter

Peter Hoeg schrieb:
> Now, the template file uses the lsb* facts to distinguish between
> debian and ubuntu and also to point towards the proper release files.
> But this setup is reactive, in the sense that apt updates the file in
> accordance with the distribution it can detect, and not the proactive
> approach where it knows what distribution to set.
> 
> While the current setup works great NOW, it becomes an issue when a
> new ubuntu comes out and the workstations require upgrading, which I
> would want to do centrally as I have no way to push the fact that they
> should be using a particular version.
> 
> Any ideas?
I came around to the point where I totally ignore the upgrade 
possibility. Services are hosted in virtual containers which can be 
easily duplicated, migrated and replaced without additional costs thanks 
to puppet management. And for my installations the hardware has a 
lifetime approximating the installed system, so the host OS stays the 
same until the hardware is dead or at least can be upgraded manually 
because there are so few of them.



Regards, DavidS