Thoughts on preseed vs config files?

[Brian Gupta]

So having an internal debate on whether to use puppet managed debian
preseed files to configure packages prior to installation or
installing with no-config and using puppet to manage the config files
after the fact.

The end of the discussion is that ideally one would use both, but if
one had to chose just one, it would be puppet managing the configs,
with the exception of certain packages that gain more benefit than
average by being configured through debconf. e.g. - Setting root mysql
password, so that debian maint. cron jobs can run without issue.

Thoughts?

-Brian

[Thomas Bendler]

2012/5/2 Brian Gupta <brian...@brandorr.com>

From my point of view it is a good way to be as close as possible on the upstream way of doing. It is surely possible to write puppet classes for everything to get administrative actions done but it is not very release save. I made the observation that the amount of work which is necessary to rewrite classes to match a new distribution release increases drastically when I do the whole work with my own written classes. When I use standard mechanisms that the distribution provide (regardless if debconf or something else) instead of own configuration mechanism I save a lot of time. I still can call the distribution mechanism with exec so I still can reflect the configuration change within puppet.

Regards, Thomas

--
Linux ... enjoy the ride!

[Dan Carley]

If you had to choose one then I would shoot for the latter. Consider that you want to maintain the state of the machine, not just it's initial installation. If one of those configs changes, because you need to roll out a new MySQL setting or someone gets naughty with vi(1), then you'll want to enforce that without going through the package installation again.